28mm Summicron-M v2 users - does your focus helicoid go past 0.7m?

[radialMelt]

Advertisement (gone after registration)

Mine seems to... in that I can rack the focus past the 0.7m mark on the lens barrel. Using live view, focus peaking, and a metre stick I can confirm that the focal point moves a few cm in from 0.7m as well - so it's not just a matter of the markings on the lens being off or something.

Not that this is a problem necessarily. It's a little tricky on my M5 since the rangefinder decouples at 0.7m, but works fine on the M10.

Just wondering if anyone else has noticed this with their 28mm Summicron-M v2.

Cheers

[adan]

It is very normal for many/most M lenses to travel past the min. focus marked on the barrel.

The rumor is that Leica does not guarantee that the lens cam will be accurate at closer than the min. engraved distance - HOWEVER, except for the ones that do decouple, most if not all that I've used have been accurate all the way to the hard stop. The gnomes go above and beyond the promise, most of the time.

(Leica has used several ways of engineering the focus cams/contacts over 90 years: full-circle threaded cam rings; pushrods driven by an internal threaded cam; back surfaces with - or without - extra machining or sloping of each individual lens's cam. Just depends on the criticality of the focusing with a slow-ish wide-angle vs. a large-aperture longer lens, or weight considerations, or cost considerations, and so on and so on.)

[Ouroboros]

I have 5 summicron lenses (28mm Safari, 35mm asph v1, 50mm Safari, 75mm apo, 90mm apo Safari).

The focus ring hard stop on all of them is slightly after the minimum focus distance marked on the lens.   

[radialMelt]

Thanks for the replies. My only other point of comparison is a 50mm Summarit 2.5, which stops right at its minimum focus mark.

Cheers!

[adan]

That's how Leica saves a few €€€ or so per Summarit  - limit the "freebie" focusing range (and the machining and metal required) to exactly what is promised and marked.

Which is not a criticism of the Summarits as such, although I do wish the 50, at least, had been marked and engineered to go to 0.7m.