'Distressed' Leica Lens...

[pippy]

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Reading through the "What was the worst?" Leica lens thread gave me some food for thought...

I've never had a badly designed Leica lens but I do have a very bad Leica lens; its a 50mm f2 Summar and these are normally pretty great performers considering it's such an old design.

Mine isn't a good performer. At some point in its history, someone seems to have adopted an unusual approach to cleaning the front element. It appears to have first received the attention of a wire-brush fitted to a power-drill after which it was given a final hand-polish with a Brillo Pad. I can't complain as it was effectively thrown-in for free with a IIIc body I picked-up so that's fine.

I tried it out (once) and, having had a hearty chortle, put it away without a second thought. Until Today! It occurred to me that the images it created were not a million miles away from certain examples I've seen in the Thambar-Crazy thread. Ten thousand miles away, maybe, but not quite a million.

So I've dragged it out from its hiding place, given the front element a good rub-down (with furniture polish, naturally) and am eagerly awaiting a break in the weather to give it another shot at Fame and Glory! I have to go into London Town tomorrow so, hopefully, it can come along for the sheer fun of it all. If it works at all I'll post the results here.

But don't hold your collective breath...

Philip.

[UliWer]

Well, you may call the Summar a badly designed lens. It was not the optical design which was really "bad" but the execution of this design was faulty. They used material to cement lens elements which proved to be not resilient to decay. Therefore you often find Summars which cannot be used today. Even if the glass is good (which it often is not) one can see milky bubbles in the lenses inner parts. It was as early as 1952 that Leitz felt obliged to explain to their retailers that "rumors about all Summars being swapped for new Summitars" were wrong. They were not explicit about the issue but recommended coating the lenses as a treatment. For coating the lens elements had to be decemented and they could apply a new cement which did not show the problems of decay. I am not sure whether this is true, but it is said that the early rigid Summar as well as the rare tropical Summar did not show the problem of cement decay, though it makes sense to assume that the process of lens assembly was different for these special types. 

[ianman]

Thank you @UliWer, that’s interesting!

[earleygallery]

That's interesting about the cement, I bought my first Leica in 1982, a lllf with a Summar and I noticed later that there was some kind of substance in the middle, which was kind of separation (but didn't look like normal). The lens worked pretty well all the same, gave a nice soft pastel look to images.

I have bought a couple of other Summar's which are both in excellent shape and they perform very well.

The glass itself was a 'soft' type that was easily scratched hence the fact that so many look like Philip describes! Just accumulated years of cleaning (never use a protective filter guys!!??).

Philip - try it out and especially for portraits!

[ianman]

Of course, I’ll be mad as f… if it works 😂🤪

[pippy]

2 hours ago, earleygallery said:

...Philip - try it out and especially for portraits!...

That was actually my first thought, James, and I will try to shoot some 'real' studio-based snaps when I get a mo'.  The extremely rapid experiment I undertook today - literally two frames taken of the lid of an old shoe-box (explanation on request!) hand-held at f2 and f5.6 on the M Monochrom - were what resolved me into giving the lens another go.

For portrait use I'm thinking of it rendering (with appropriate lighting, of course) somewhere along the lines of a Vermeer 'Personage' when viewed through a Series-VIII Softar filter.....but with far less contrast.

If I'm even partially correct in my great expectations(*) I already understand that much Post-prod tweaking will be involved (images will not be fine SOOC!) but the photographs were sharp; they were simply clothed in an extraordinary amount of what can best be termed 'veiling flare' - in all honesty similar to a more exaggerated version of what one would expect from, say, a v1 or v2 35mm Summilux shot wide-open.

Unfortunately the weather is set to stay pretty overcast and gloomy until Sunday at the earliest and we're away for the weekend so little chance to give the lens a 'proper' outing but I'm quite determined to see what can be achieved.

Philip.

(*) EDIT : My nickname since childhood has always been Pip...

Edited November 10, 2021 by pippy

[pippy]

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6 minutes ago, ianman said:

Of course, I’ll be mad as f… if it works 😂🤪

Too funny! You can always console yourself that it's a mere 50mm and, with the MFD it has, cannot begin to compare with the Thambar as an option when Greta Garbo rings your doorbell for her next portrait session...

Philip.

Edited November 10, 2021 by pippy

[mikemgb]

I have a Summar with a fungus etched middle group, the images from it have a unique look, sometimes OK, other times full of flare with a distinct glow to the image. I’m hoping one day to find a Summar with bad front and rear elements I can harvest the middle group from. 

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[Ecar]

If worse comes to worst, you could always have the front element polished (best achieved by people who know what they are doing, so as to remove as little glass as possible and preserve the original curve) - and even recoated. Although it probably doesn't make much sense from a purely economic perspective, the results are rather impressive. I had such treatment applied by Peter Grisaffi well over a decade ago to one of my Summars that was essentially unusable but that I wanted to keep for sentimental reasons. Although coating of Summars was a well-established practices since coatings became available after WWII, the application of modern coatings makes this lens much more usable in all circumstances - although arguably at the expense of part of its original "character".

And FWIW, my poor man's Thambar is a late Jupiter-9 85/2 from 1987 (earlier versions are much less dreamy). Can't get the rings, though😉

[pippy]

6 hours ago, Ecar said:

If worse comes to worst, you could always have the front element polished (best achieved by people who know what they are doing, so as to remove as little glass as possible and preserve the original curve) - and even recoated...

And FWIW, my poor man's Thambar is a late Jupiter-9 85/2 from 1987 (earlier versions are much less dreamy). Can't get the rings, though😉

In all honesty I doubt that I will ever consider having anything done to the lens. I have quite a number of other 50mm lenses already and in both LTM and M fitting so I'm really quite spoiled for choice. Nor - unlike yourself with yours - do I have any attachment to this particular Summar. If I did want a 'working' one I'd probably just keep an eye out for a very good example and go down that route.

Interesting to read that the post '87 J-9 is different from the earlier versions. I have a few Jupiters but the only one which gets used on the Digi-M cameras is my J-12 35mm f2.8 (Biogon copy) which is a lovely performer! I also use it on my 1930 Leica 1 model A to Standardised 1 Model C conversion with similarly wonderful results.

FWIW there was a little bit of sunshine after all when I was heading into town (as mentioned in the OP) so I did take a few snaps with the Summar. The first, posted below, was grabbed just as my train was arriving so no time for a comparison with a 'real' lens but it's quite interesting in its own way. I didn't want to faff around too much - it's hardly a prize-winner(!) - so simply clicked 'Auto-Levels' when I processed-out the DNG and left it like that.

Camera was the M-D Typ-262, 1/750 f5.6 @ ISO200;

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Philip.

Edited November 11, 2021 by pippy

[pippy]

Here is a pair of pics taken for a (near) direct comparison test.

Not having thought through too deeply about what I was going to do I was a bit silly in that I didn't grab a second 50mm lens so the sharper of the two images was snapped using a 35 and cropped-in to roughly the same image-area. The pictures as posted are very low-res and low-quality - just to get them both posted in the same place - but hopefully you can all get the general gist of how things stand.

Again; no faffing around. Just auto-levels.

In hindsight the subject is far too busy for my purposes but I was in a bit of a hurry to get to a meeting and at least it gives me a vague idea of what's what.

35mm Summilux at f8 at top / 50mm Summar at f8.5 below;

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Philip.

Edited November 11, 2021 by pippy

[darylgo]

Interesting post and much better imaging than I would have thought.  These are the type of lenses I would use when shooting a subject repeatedly, looking for something different.  Your Thambar description was quite apt.  I am now looking for some brillo pads, a wire brush drill attachment and a sacrificial lens.   Perhaps someone has a less damaged copy to do a direct comparison.  I do have similar lenses, not damaged glass but rather fog that makes them difficult to shoot with any contrast.  Never bothered to have them cleaned for the same reason you state, I have others that I can use.  The upside is that I can sell them as-is and realize a nice profit, they've been sitting for 30 years and prices have been moving upward.  Occasionally I'll put a 1930's Leica lens on a M10 and marvel that they are fully compatible 80-90 years apart with the better lenses give surprising results.  Trying this with some older Nikon F lenses gave disappointing results.  

Edited November 11, 2021 by darylgo

[pippy]

18 minutes ago, darylgo said:

Interesting post and much better imaging than I would have thought.  These are the type of lenses I would use when shooting a subject repeatedly, looking for something different.  Your Thambar description was quite apt...

Thanks for the reply, darylgo. Yes; the results - especially the shot of the station - turned out better than I remember from the first occasion when I used the lens but that was on a Barnack with Tri-X so perhaps a mix of coarse-ish grain plus commercial-processing/printing/scanning allowed a reduction in image quality (or what there is of it!) at each step?

I'm pretty keen to get some pics done in the studio. I need to try out a mix of different techniques; things such as 'What does it render like using the same subject and lighting but different apertures?' and 'What difference does changing the lighting-contrast make?'.

As it is the lens seems to draw images with a very low-contrast profile even when, as in the cases pictured, the actual dynamic range is very large. This might actually be a good thing in some ways as it might fill-in the shadows allowing detail to be recorded and retained in Post-Prod. One downside, however, might be that detail in highlights gets lost in the overall 'soup'.

Looking forward to a free day for some play-time in the studio - possibly Monday. Hopefully I can persuade bribe my daughter to sit-in for the experiment. If not? Well; there's always the cat...

Philip.

[pgk]

That's typical of the results I've seen or had from lenses with front element damage (multiple fine scratches). Its seems that highlight bleed is a primary roblem as the light is scattered by the scratches. I would suspect is that the 'underlying' image will still be relatively 'sharp' with some fine detail showing, but everything will look slightly 'fuzzy' as light bleeds across high contrast edges. A repolish mght help but may degrade the overall performance if a significan amount of glass has to be ground away.

[Lelmer]

1 hour ago, pippy said:

Here is a pair of pics taken for a (near) direct comparison test.

Not having thought through too deeply about what I was going to do I was a bit silly in that I didn't grab a second 50mm lens so the sharper of the two images was snapped using a 35 and cropped-in to roughly the same image-area. The pictures as posted are very low-res and low-quality - just to get them both posted in the same place - but hopefully you can all get the general gist of how things stand.

Again; no faffing around. Just auto-levels.

In hindsight the subject is far too busy for my purposes but I was in a bit of a hurry to get to a meeting and at least it gives me a vague idea of what's what.

35mm Summilux at f8 at top / 50mm Summar at f8.5 below;

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Philip.

I like the Summar picture a lot. It reminds me a Gainsborough painting...great

[Ecar]

2 hours ago, pippy said:

Interesting to read that the post '87 J-9 is different from the earlier versions. I have a few Jupiters but the only one which gets used on the Digi-M cameras is my J-12 35mm f2.8 (Biogon copy) which is a lovely performer! I also use it on my 1930 Leica 1 model A to Standardised 1 Model C conversion with similarly wonderful results.

Some would even say that all Jupiters are different from one another within the same version, due to sloppy tolerances, generally poor QC and sometimes several factories producing the same model at the same time...

Regarding the J-9, I don't think the 1987 date has any relevance. My "Thambar-like" copy just happens to have been manufactured that year. However, I remember reading a theory about the various J-9 iterations somewhere (perhaps translated from some Russian forum or magazine?). According to it, each redesign of the lens was driven by objectives based on the prevailing aesthetic portrait requirements of the times (in the FSU at least), hence an evolution from "clean sharpness" to "glamour". Don't quote me on this, as I don't know if the theory is accurate or if it's actually manufacturing quality that went south along with the Soviet economy, but it does mirror my experience with several J-9s from various periods. FWIW, I have kept an early, Arsenal-made 1958 and a late KMZ 1987 - both optically as mint as they come and both in Contax mount to mitigate focus issues - essentially because...they are very different lenses!

[pippy]

33 minutes ago, pgk said:

That's typical of the results I've seen or had from lenses with front element damage (multiple fine scratches). Its seems that highlight bleed is a primary roblem as the light is scattered by the scratches. I would suspect is that the 'underlying' image will still be relatively 'sharp' with some fine detail showing, but everything will look slightly 'fuzzy' as light bleeds across high contrast edges. A repolish mght help but may degrade the overall performance if a significan amount of glass has to be ground away.

Yes, Paul, that describes the situation exactly. The front element is an absolute maze of fine scratches. At first glance they are hard to see but when seen highly magnified the 'fine-damage' really is quite extraordinary in terms of how much of the surface is affected.

As far as the underlying sharpness and fine detail goes here's a crop at roughly 150% magnification. Have a look (double-click or whatever works for you to get the larger version) at how the fine branches of the tree above the attic window have been captured. These twiglets are not exactly thick in diameter yet they have been resolved fairly well;

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Whilst my 'wire-brush and Brillo Pad' comment was a slight exaggeration one thing is clear(pun) and it is that whatever type of mildly abrasive substance was used to 'clean' the lens it was used with gusto and not just in a localised area; the scratches really do cover the whole of the element from the centre to the edge and in every possible direction.

The 'highlight bleed' is what I was referring to in the third paragraph of post #13. There will be no point in having it professionally restored. As mentioned a bit earlier I have a rather silly choice in terms of 50's from crazy things like the '53 f1.5 Summarit (M) to sensible things like my Summicron.

Besides; have you seen how much a kosher Thambar would set me back?!?! With this in the bag I've got that base already covered....

But don't tell Ian!!!

Philip.

[pgk]

49 minutes ago, pippy said:

Whilst my 'wire-brush and Brillo Pad' comment was a slight exaggeration one thing is clear(pun) and it is that whatever type of mildly abrasive substance was used to 'clean' the lens it was used with gusto and not just in a localised area; the scratches really do cover the whole of the element from the centre to the edge and in every possible direction.

I remember watching a press photographer carefully 'scrub' the front element of a longish tele-Nikkor at a race track, with his tie. All his gear was carried in a shoulder bag with no caps on (no filters), and no dividers. I think that it was the debris from the bag that he was wiping off. I assumed that the gear must have belonged to a newspaper!

[pippy]

1 hour ago, Ecar said:

...FWIW, I have kept an early, Arsenal-made 1958 and a late KMZ 1987 - both optically as mint as they come and both in Contax mount to mitigate focus issues - essentially because...they are very different lenses!...

I completely understand your situation, Ecar. as I have similar experiences with different versions of 'the same' lenses in both LTM and Contax mount. Sixties J-8's are different from '80's J-8's and so on. One oddity I picked up was a Contax-mount J-11 but instead of being a 13,5cm it is a 11,5cm lens...

Just for fits'n'giggles - and risking the wrath of the OP - here's an off-topic quick snapshot of the aforementioned J-12 on the 1930 Leica 1, Both being Black-Paint they seem to be very well matched in the aesthetic stakes;

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Results from this combination have been posted elsewhere in the forum.

Philip.

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Hallo,

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[pippy]

5 hours ago, Lelmer said:

I like the Summar picture a lot. It reminds me a Gainsborough painting...great

What a lovely thing to say, Lelmer, and I thank you for it.

This was one of the interesting things about the snaps I took today; I had no real idea what I might discover about how the lens renders and, of course, this is only the start of things. If things do go fairly well then I will make a bulk-purchase of wire-brushes, buy Brillo Pads by the Pallet-load and embark upon a new career as an Haut-Couture "Lens-Distresser" sans pareil for the well-heeled.

......or not, as the case may be.

Philip.

Edited November 11, 2021 by pippy