Lenses and odd performance.

[pgk]

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I have owned 3 x 90mm Elmarit-M (E46) lenses. Stupidly I sold the first, realised what a mistake I'd made and bought another. The second copy is great, works well and its only real flaw is very marginal chromatic aberration which is easily cleaned up in post processing. All well and good then. Recently I bought another, damaged copy which has substantial coating loss and cleaning scratches to the front element. Leica can (and will at some point when I decide to act and get it done) replace the front element on this lens.

 

I bought it mostly to satisfy my curiosity about front element damage (it was cheap enough) and its real world effect, and to that end I'm using it alongside my second (good and unblemished) copy.

 

The thing is that although I've only shot a few images (including this one: https://www.l-camera-forum.com/topic/281462-no-trams-today-winter-sun/) I can already see substantial differences in the two lenses. The third (damaged glass) copy shows veiling flare and bleeding highlights into adjacent dark areas. Highlights quickly block if adjusted as its contrast is substantially reduced. As a result its dynamic range is low and there is less possibility of recovery of either highlight or shadow tonality. Which is what I had expected.

 

What I had not expected is that this third and damaged copy exhibits no chromatic aberration that I can see at all. Fine detail, whilst slightly softer due to 'bleed' of light from lighter to darker tones, is extremely well rendered and the lens appears to be a very 'sharp' copy indeed. My second copy has yielded some great images which have printed up well to near 30" x 20" so is in practice absolutely fine, but I am very careful in processing its images to ensure that I get every nuance out of it and chromatic aberration adjustment is a part of the workflow. But I'm already starting to wonder if it too might benefit from a trip to Wetzlar to be adjusted to see if it can be made even better - or should I simply get the third copy rebuilt with a new front element? Decisions!

 

Testing equipment can have its unexpected side effects.

Edited February 3, 2018 by pgk

[pgk]

And FWIW here is a shot taken on the damaged lens and given substantial adjustment in Photoshop. There is still light bleed from light areas into adjacent darker ones but the result having taken care and time in post processing, may just look a little more old fashioned than it should.

 

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[pgk]

And another shot, this time into the light. This handles the contre jour lighting surprisingly well but illustrates that there is virtually no gradation in the background mountains due to the veiling flare causing low contrast and very little tonal differences in the shadows. The extreme highlights are bleeding into the shadows too.

 

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Edited February 3, 2018 by pgk

[lct]

My Elmarit 90/2.8 v2 has less CA than my Summicron 90/2 v3 but rather more so than my other 90mm M lenses so it is difficult to say if your sound copy would benefit from a trip to Germany, as far as CA is concerned at least. What is sure is color fringing is more apparent in high contrast condition so one could expect that a reduction of contrast due to flare or otherwise may reduce fringing accordingly.