What's the true story surrounding the birth of Red Scale Elmars?

[TomB_tx]

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When the M3 was introduced it also had a 1 m close focus limit, so lenses from that era did likewise. The goggled 35mm lenses could focus closer due to the desgn of the goggles. I believe when the M2 came out a few years later the .7 range became standard, as it didn’t use the goggled lens.

[UliWer]

I‘d put it the other way round: when the M3 was designed in the early fifties there were no lenses which could be focussed closer than 1m without additional devices. So the limitation of the camera was a result of lens design. I am not sure whether it would have been possible to enable the rangefinder for closer distances, parallax correction might have been difficult for the large magnification of the M3 viewfinder. 

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[Alberti]

On 1/3/2023 at 10:42 PM, wlaidlaw said:

William, 

I had the nearest thing to a bad Elmar, not optically but standard of manufacture. This must have been right at the end of the run of the 50/2.8-M lenses, as it was factory coded from new, which means 2007 or later. I bought it as unsold new old stock in 2009, but sadly without a factory warranty and I suspect returned by a previous owner. It was really badly put together, compared with say my 1956 vintage 50/2.8 Elmar-M, which I bought later, where the lens extension feels like a hydraulic piston. If you held it mounted on a camera when collapsed, with the lens down, the optical cell would drop out to the extended position under just gravity. When it was twisted to lock, you could wobble the optical cell around in the mount. There were no perceptible detents in the aperture ring, which felt loose and half detached, so it was very easy to alter the aperture unintentionally when focusing the lens. I quickly passed it on to a new owner. How it passed quality control completely escaped me but then that was a bad period for Leica, when quality took a very severe dip. 

Wilson

 

Just as a note, I have a M-elmar-M 90 mm from 2007 with exactly the same problems (impossible to walk around with it when not locked extended), otherwise a formidable lens. Yes I got a 30% discount…