Needs a recommendation for a good lens for testing

[Crazy Cat Lady]

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As some of you know I am testing my lens and M8. Since neither of my lenses, 35 cron & 35 lux ASPH coded are not very reliable now I need a lens that I know will give good results. Results meaning no back focusing, sharp images, etc. Can anyone name a lens that has a good reputation? My budget is about $1600. I am not sure if I must stay with the same focal length when testing. But if focal length does not matter, then I would not like to go any wider than 28mm.

 

Thanks

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[Shootist]

As some of you know I am testing my lens and M8. Since neither of my lenses, 35 cron & 35 lux ASPH coded are not very reliable now I need a lens that I know will give good results. Results meaning no back focusing, sharp images, etc. Can anyone name a lens that has a good reputation? My budget is about $1600. I am not sure if I must stay with the same focal length when testing. But if focal length does not matter, then I would not like to go any wider than 28mm.

 

Thanks

50mm f/2 Cron.

[Guest Olof]

28mm 2.8 Elmarit asph

[Jamie Roberts]

Jennifer, if your rangefinder needs adjusting no lens--no matter how good--will give reliable results.

 

Leaving aside completely the "question" of recent 35 Lux ASPH lenses, I'd send in the camera--with your 35 Cron--to be checked by someone good. I don't think anyone has said the 35 Cron will not focus!

 

I have a contact in the US; I'll try to get you a name of someone good for this and I will post it here. In Canada, it would be Kindermann Canada.

[ho_co]

Jamie is right.

 

You've got two 35's, and are talking about getting an additional lens.

 

Before you spend more money, remember that your camera is under warranty and if the rangefinder is off, Leica US will adjust it free.

 

If either of your current lenses is out of adjustment, Leica or another competent repair organization can adjust it and the body to work properly together.

 

Your best bet is to pack up both lenses and the M8 and send them to Allendale with a description of the problem: Both lenses backfocus. Is it the body or the lenses? Please adjust.

 

But please don't buy a third lens until you know that the body is working properly.

 

--HC

[j. borger]

I agree .. if you can't take sharp pictures with two 35's ... including the 35 cron asph ... there is something badly wrong with the camera, your particular lenses or your technique.

In fact i have not seen ANY lens which does not render extremely sharp pictures with the M8!

If there is one thing not to worry about with the M8 it's sharpness ..... i often want to temper it in post-processing because it can be just too much.

Do not buy a new lens .... have it checked !

[thpeters]

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Hi Jennifer,

 

If everything is going well, then this Thursday I have my M8 back with my lenses, if you have patience I let you so quick as possible know, if my backfocus problem is solved.

 

I agree with others, dont buy an other lens, let Leica repair it for free.

 

 

Theo

[tashley]

Hi Jen,

 

I'm sorry to say I dissent from most of the above posts.

 

@Jamie, the two lenses I returned were 35 Lux and as we all know ad nauseum, Solms tested them, told me that their behaviour was standard for these lenses on the M8 and offered me another focal length rather than repair. They warned me that the 35 Cron would do the same but less so, and indeed the lens I now own is a 35 cron (all those damned birdboxes!) and we've all seen what it does.

 

So I happen to believe the manufacturer, though I have no explanation for why some examples of these lenses DO work properly.

 

What I think this means for Jennifer is that she needs to establish if her RF is 'in whack' or out of it, because there is a good chace that Leica won't make any effort to 'fix' the lenses. Her options are

 

a) Send the whole lot back to Leica for repair (time-consuming and frustrating and quite possibly with no resolution)

Use a known-to-be-reliable lens to find out if her RF is ok and if it is, find an independent repairer to look at the lenses.

 

 

I don't suggest for a moment that she purchases a new lens for this purpose. She should purchase a new lens because she happens to want that focal length! In any event, a new lens is not itself to be trusted until it has proven its worth. Therefore she should borrow from another forum member who lives locally, or test extensively at her dealer, a lens which someone expert KNOWS to be good on an M8.

 

For that purpose I would suggest a 50 Cron. One hears few complaints of backfocus with it, it is bang in the middle of the focal length range, and it is long enough to have selective DOF but short enough to be reliably focussed.

 

I have detailed to Jen in seperate threads how to use the lens to test her RF.

 

Jen I'm sorry that you are getting conflicting advice - and I certainly do believe that an independent expert might be able to get your 35's working on your body. But sending the whole kit back to Leica would not be my first option.

 

Tim

[jaapv]

I cannot repeat it often enough: Take your camera to the optician and look through the viewfinder using correction lenses. A rangefinder cannot be focussed adequately with vision that has a small "defect", which may be unnoticed in daily use! Often it takes the form of consistent back or frontfocussing. Only after that cause has been eliminated it makes sense to take further steps like adjusting the camera, lens or both. Just buying another lens will not solve the problem.

[glenerrolrd]

I cannot repeat it often enough: Take your camera to the optician and look through the viewfinder using correction lenses. A rangefinder cannot be focussed adequately with vision that has a small "defect", which may be unnoticed in daily use! Often it takes the form of consistent back or frontfocussing. Only after that cause has been eliminated it makes sense to take further steps like adjusting the camera, lens or both. Just buying another lens will not solve the problem.

I have been working on this and agree 100%. Your eyes and your technique represent a significant variable in your focusing system. Try one of Tim Jackson s focust test charts(focustestcharts.com) ..even at 1 meter ....can you read the text on the focus target? The magnifier and possibly the correct diopter are ..IMHO...necessary to achive critical focus. After trying this a few times I realized that picking the finest detail text was necessary to achieve consistency . Now try this handhead at say 2 meters ( typical close focus distance). How accurate can you get it ? I am not suggesting that getting your finder spot on isn t important...but part of that is starting with the most accurate focus you can produce.

[rob_x2004]

Been reading these threads or bits of them, and what I cant understand is why it is a problem. With the amount of effort you have to put in learning a lens from a framing perspective, particularly for different subject to horizon distances, cant you just get used to the point of focus at any aperture? If you do your tests, due dilligence and all that, you know the answers.

 

I am only asking, new to M and I only shoot film. But I find there is a lot of lens learning, lot of depth of field learning, lot of framing learning. I guess it would be a nuisance for those expecting point and shoot SLR characteristics. Like I said I havent got it right yet, not that I consider good enough. You guys get f/stop displayed in vf dont you?

 

What are the situations in practice this change of focus plane causes a problem?

[Jamie Roberts]

Rob--you need to the read the 35 posts to understand this. Tim's are off by several feet at f4, and--with the greatest respect Tim--he believes Leica has done this by design.

 

No amount of "getting used to focus variation" will let you adjust for several feet of prime focus (not focal field) shift (and no--we don't get aperture displayed in the viewfinder).

 

On the other hand, to me--and many, many, many other silent 35 lux and cron users--Tim has a problem with the lenses or the camera--or both.

 

Still tracking down a place that might help...

[tashley]

Rob--you need to the read the 35 posts to understand this. Tim's are off by several feet at f4, and--with the greatest respect Tim--he believes Leica has done this by design.

 

No amount of "getting used to focus variation" will let you adjust for several feet of prime focus (not focal field) shift (and no--we don't get aperture displayed in the viewfinder).

 

On the other hand, to me--and many, many, many other silent 35 lux and cron users--Tim has a problem with the lenses or the camera--or both.

 

Still tracking down a place that might help...

 

 

Cunning Jamie! I appreciate the need for brevity ;-) but I don't 'believe' that Leica did it 'by design' - I was TOLD (by Leica) that the lens was designed for film and that one of the trade-offs in its aspheric construction, in exchange for flatness of field, was that it exhibits focus shift over parts of the frame at certain apertures and that involves the chosen plane of focus moving OOF at times. Which it does.

 

You will also note that the silent hordes have at least in part been matched by a large number of people who have had serious focus issues with the lenses, and that from time to time, people who initially claimed no problem found when they tested carefully that they did have one!

 

You might also recall that I have two M8 bodies, both of which have great focus with all my other glass - and that I have tested 35mm lenses on other bodies too.

 

I also vaguely remember that you were going to post your own test results avec tripod sans carpet but never quite got around to it...

 

Still looking forward to it though ;-)

 

Am trying to help Jen here. My feeling is that if she has 35mm lenses that aren't focussing, it might be the lenses or it might be the body; which is why I've suggested a method of narrowing it down...

 

Tim

 

ps all the above said with an affectionate but mildly rueful grin...

[Crazy Cat Lady]

Thanks everyone for your advice. I am still unsure on what I am going to do. The reason why I bought the 35 lux ASPH (used) in the first place was because they 35 cron was just not fast enough. I was going to keep the lux, get rid of the cron and get another lens in a month or so. Since I bought the 35 lux used it is not covered under leica warranty, so I do not think I can send in that lens to leica. I did get the 1.25x magnifier and still the same problem As some people have suggested, I am looking into the diopter.

 

The only leica dealer around here is closing. They never had any leica demo's, they would just order it for you. Plus, they are closing their store this month anyway. I got them off of the leica website when I was searching for dealers. They were the only ones that came up within a 100 mile radius I called some other stores and no one that I know of rents out leica lenses.

 

All I know is that this is very frustrating to say the least. It makes me want to give up, but I will not for now. I still have some determination left.

 

Thanks again everyone for your help.

[Jamie Roberts]

Tim--forgive my brevity please!

 

I didn't mean to mis-characterize what you believe, honestly, and I think we're in total agreement about what Jennifer should do (check the body and lens) and not do (don't send the lens into Leica US, mainly because they're apparently pretty busy )

 

So Jennifer--you need to get this stuff checked by someone who knows M8 bodies and lenses.

 

Tim--the gist of our dilemma is that you have two Leica 35s that won't focus properly on either M8 at f4, and out by several feet at that point. No? Others have had problems with the 35 too (more the Lux than the Cron), and everyone reports a focus shift as you stop down, though to date I haven't heard many people say the focus point actually goes out as the field shifts.

 

And I (and others) have a 35 Lux (used, mine is chrome, for whatever that's worth) that don't exhibit this behaviour at all; the focal center is sharp through wide open to diffraction limit.

 

As for tests, Tim--I can't remember honestly what I was going to test at this point, since I've been too busy taking pictures (for fun, no less). But remind me again--I thought what I needed to do was increase the angle on my test shots?

 

And all of this is said with affectionate perplexity as well. If we both drank enough, the sharpness of our shots would equal out no matter what lens we used

[charlesphoto99]

My M8 came with a mis-adjusted rangefinder out of the box. According to my local dealer he has seen this on more than a few occasions. It was soft on lenses 21 - 135mm. Because I'm a tinkerer I've manged to get it to focus spot on with most lenses - the two that aren't are going off to DAG (28 summicron due to a previous faulty repair by Leica and is, alas, now out of warranty - never caught the problem on film; the other a pre asph 50 that focus about an inch behind throughout). I don't recommend self adjustment of the rangefinder to Jennifer - it's not just the allen key/infinity adjustment but a fine play between that and the seperate near far adjustment. I used my 90 apo as the calibration lens because the tolerance is tightest and can't be thrown by inherent depth of field (like on a 28). It took a good day to do though by end worked out a system. Tripod and left brain thinking a must.

 

My 35 asph summilux does backfocus, starting at about f4 - gets a bit better by f8. Not bad enough that I'm going to jettison it but it does do that (a matter of an inch to an inch and a half - not feet). I think that in real world shooting it won't be that much of a problem - if it's a stationary subject will just adjust the focus and chimp. Mine is absolutely tack sharp at 1.4 and 2 so if that's not the case with Jennifer's (use a tripod and focus at some good b&w text at about one meter away) then it's her rangefinder. The lenses may still backfocus stopped down, but that's another issue.

 

Also, it's easy to find out which way it's off - set up tripod and focus right on the subject, focus slightly nearer, and then slightly farther - which looks the best?

[lars_bergquist]

I have an M8 and the rangefinder coupled lenses I own (I have others too) are 21 mm Elmarit-M, 28 mm Summicron-ASPH, 35 mm Summicron-M, 35 mm Summilux ASPH, 50 mm Summilux ASPH, 75 mm Color-Heliar, 90 mm Elmarit, 90 mm Tele-Elmarit v.2, 90 mm Summicron-M and 135 mm Elmarit-M. The 'fingerprints' of all these lenses are not identical, but they all give tack sharp results. If the picture is not tack sharp, then I made a mistake, and I damn well know which one. Also, I have never met an M camera that left either Wetzlar or Solms with the rangefinder off – and, to tell the truth, no other M either, unless some butcher had messed with it. The M rangefinder is more precise, and in the case of wide-angle lenses VASTLY more precise, than any SLR.

 

Conclusion: I concur with the opinion that this is pilot error, and that, as a first try, you should let an optometrician check your eyesight. The eyepiece of all M cameras is set so that the framelines and the rangefinder patch are at a virtual distance of 2 meters (= +0.5 dioptries). If your eyesight is off, then Leica can supply correction lenses of up to plus or minus two dioptries, in steps of 0.5 dioptries, to screw into the eyepiece frame thread. Your friendly optometrician can tell you which one, if you tell him about the +0.5 dioptries. I am badly presbyopic – I cannot even see the horizon sharply – and wear progressive specs but have no problem with the finder. One learns very quickly through what part of the glasses one should look at the finder.

 

Another possibility is that your rangefinder technique is not quite up to par yet. This, after an age of SLR cameras and in an age of autofocus, is nothing to be ashamed of. The camera manual has some good tips. The trick is to select, even before you raise the camera to your eye, the detail you will focus on – and then focus on it, by either of the three possible techniques: Double images coinciding, maximum contrast in the rangefinder (not optimal), or sideways displacement or lining up of a vertical line or contour that passes the edge of the rangefinder patch (best, but not always possible). Train, exercise, grind grind grind. Practice makes perfect.

 

While you do this, stay in horizontal or 'landscape' format. Pros always focus rangefinder cameras thus, and if necessary, rotate them to 'portrait' immediately before pressing the button. This is faster than fiddling with focusing a vertically held camera. This is however one of the two reasons why one should never usa a fast lens (meaning faster than about f:4!) wide open at or around one meter. Depth of field would be so shallow that even taking a heavy breath might throw your subject out of focus! I suspect that this lies behind much of the griping about 'back-focusing' and supposed lens faults recently.

 

Hope this is useful! The old man from the Age of the M3

[charlesphoto99]

I've been shooting M's professionally for over 12 years now - .58 bodies mostly at that. My last book of photos was featured in "Leicaview" next to Eliot Erwitt's. I know how to focus - and I also knew that my M8 was off right away. It's been a known issue. Not sure why - probably Leica does but isn't telling. Maybe their jig was out for a period of time or they hired somebody new or any number of explanations. But it is happening. I opted to give adjustment a go myself but wouldn't recommend to others. I figured I want to give the camera a work out first to se if death syndrome, etc would happen - then I'd be without for weeks. So far only a near death yesterday - removing battery reset the problem.

 

Yes, some people new to rangefinders might be having a hard time. But in my opinion, M's are easier than slr's to focus, particuarly in low light and on a stationary subject. Way easier than my Nikon D200 which I only have manual focus lenses for and find the wider ones impossible. I'll usually rent AF if need be because of that.

 

So enough of the "it's your eyes and/or technique" advice. A bit patronising to some of us.

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[jaapv]

That is not what I said, Charles. I suggested that, if one has a focussing problem it is wisest to test the whole chain, beginning at the adaptation of ones eyes to the rangefinder and work up from there.

[lars_bergquist]

That is not what I said, Charles. I suggested that, if one has a focussing problem it is wisest to test the whole chain, beginning at the adaptation of ones eyes to the rangefinder and work up from there.

 

Right, Jaap! But normally the search does end right at that start ...

 

The insufferable old man from the Age of Eyeball Photography