35 Summilux FLE or pre-FLE?

[Carduelis]

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Thanks for the advice from everyone. The 35 mm Summarit was the first Leica lens that I ever bought when I first acquired a Ricoh GXR with Leica M mount module. Although it worked very well on the Ricoh with the cropped sensor, I did find that it was a little soft at the edges when I finally bought a Leica M 240. I think the pre-FLE 35 Asph Summilux is a very good lens which IMO renders beautifully and is sharp, though not clinically sharp. For landscapes, I tend to use it stopped down at F8-F13 to minimise field curvature.

 

As I am working in N Scotland at the moment. I popped into Ffordes at Beauly yesterday on my day off and bought a Zeiss ZM 35 mm f2.8 Biogon lens. After testing it at Ffordes and photographing Fortrose cathedral and the coastline at Cromarty, I am very impressed with it. I already know about its high contrast characteristics but it seems to be very sharp. I think field curvature will be OK at stopped down apertures. On the subject of sharpness, it rates very highly in PCMag. The last time I looked at this website, it looked as though the sharpness Imatest results had been pulled for the 35 Asph Summilux FLE lens.

[shinobi2012]

Am 25.8.2012 um 09:01 schrieb lars_bergquist:

I have owned the 1962 Summilux. I have owned the Summilux-M ASPH v.1. I own the Summilux ASPH v.2 ("FLE").

 

The v.1 worked without problems with film, for about ten years, because the depth of the emulsion took care of much of the focus shift. The focus shift of the v.1 with a digital camera however meant that I could not use the thing at apertures from f:2 to f:5.6, because I could not nab the focus. If sharpness was satisfactory, then d.o..d. acted up, with none on the hither side of the subject and all of it on the far side. All this was unacceptable to me. I suspect that I am a technically somewhat fastidious photographer, but I am certainly not a pedant. Some of you will remember my saying that "sharpness is the fetish of boring photographers". And that is true; sharpness can not make a boring picture interesting. On the other hand, I do want an interesting picture to be tolerably sharp.

 

The picture here was shot at f:2 on a dark terrace in the Tuscan countryside, a true snapshot. And at a distance where a focus shift of the magnitude exhibited by the v.1 would have made it impossible. Case closed.

 

The old man from the Age of Scale Focusing

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I am really wondering, because my early ASPH V1 (pre Fle) is sharp white open and between f2-f4 also...I think it is adjusted for f2, even close distance is sharp on f 1.4 (Leica M9). On film its sharp anyway.

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