Leica quality control frustrations - lens calibration

[Auroralabs]

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I'm a new Leica M user with an M11. This year I  bought or tested six brand new Leica lenses from authorized dealers; four of the six were mis-calibrated and either front or back focusing with my M11. All lenses were made late last year or sometime this year. It's not my body, as I checked some of them against another M11. The ones sent to Leica NJ came back perfectly calibrated (even with the focus shift) without needing to send in my M11.

So if Leica NJ can perfectly calibrate a lens you send them, why doesn't Leica ship them this way and avoid giving us this frustration? We are certainly paying enough for them. The situation is just so frustrating to new Leica users, turns them off the brand, and is unacceptable for how much these lenses cost. The funny thing is I just bought my first new Voigtlander lens, a Nokton 35mm f1.4 II that's dirt cheap by Leica standards, and it came in perfect calibration with my M11 at f1.4 (I know, small sample size, but still).

I can only think of a few reasons why Leica is this sloppy with lens calibration:

1). Most users never test and never notice. Thus it's easier and cheaper to ship them with current tolerances and fix the ones received by pickier users.

2). Leica intends to ship them with the tolerances needed, but they have sloppy workers and sloppy QC checkers and miss the tolerances. Leica support cleans up the mess but with most users not noticing Leica may not realize the scale of the issue.

My experience has not been what I imagined spending this pile of money to get into the Leica ecosystem to be like. Searching this forum, it seems it's been a problem for quite a while now, with some users even saying they expect to need to send a new lens in for calibration issues.

What do others think? If Leica support can perfectly calibrate a lens (as been my experience) why doesn't Leica HQ ship them this way?

Edited November 12, 2022 by Auroralabs

[lct]

Leica QC is certainly not the best but it cannot remove all risk of storage, handling and transportation. Some European users are used to make a trip to Wetzlar to pick up their own gear, go figure...

[darylgo]

1 hour ago, Auroralabs said:

What do others think? 

Your frustration is shared by many.  Once calibrated it’s worth the expense and inconvenience.  

[28framelines]

My Leica MP came brand new in box with the rangefinder completely misaligned (like, it was VERY noticeable using a 28mm lens, on film no less, where you’d imagine any slight intolerances would be made up for with depth of field or the film itself). Got it serviced, works like a dream. It’s certainly frustrating (it was my first Leica experience) but no issues since!

EDIT: Clarity

Edited November 12, 2022 by 28framelines

[Auroralabs]

1 hour ago, lct said:

Leica QC is certainly not the best but it cannot remove all risk of storage, handling and transportation. Some European users are used to make a trip to Wetzlar to pick up their own gear, go figure...

I'm not sure storage/handling/transportation could account for miscalibrated lenses though. For rangefinder bodies that would make more sense and understandable. For lenses my repair invoices from Leica mentions tuning rings, sometimes three of then. I assume they are spacing shims to get the lens in proper calibration. I don't think transportation or handling repairs would need tuning rings as they are physical spacers.  It's just baffling Leica HQ wouldn't do from the start what Leica Repair seems to do correctly.

Edited November 12, 2022 by Auroralabs

[lct]

10 minutes ago, Auroralabs said:

I'm not sure storage/handling/transportation could account for miscalibrated lenses though. For rangefinder bodies that would make more sense and understandable. For lenses my repair invoices from Leica mentions tuning rings, sometimes three of then. I assume they are spacing shims to get the lens in proper calibration. I don't think transportation or handling repairs would need tuning rings. I think Leica should spend the time to ship lenses in properly precise calibration, especially now they have 60MP sensors like the M11.

You asked for others' opinion, you got mine after 30+ years of Leica practice but I can still be wrong needless to say. As far as i'm concerned i don't count my Leica lenses anymore and i have only had two miscalibration issues due to lenses designed for film and needing to be adapted for digital. Criticism is easy but art is difficult .

[Auroralabs]

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2 hours ago, Al Brown said:

Miscalibration issues in brand new lenses are possibly not as frequent (always test a lens on at least two bodies) as decentering QC issues, first hand experience with a brand new, factory sealed 75mm Summarit from me and a brand new, factory sealed APO 35mm ASPH Summicron from my work colleague.
 

How badly decentered was the 35mm APO Summicron? Was it mainly in the corners or worse? I'm surprised, at $8,300 USD for a 35mm f/2 lens I'd expect not having to worry about that issue.

[jaeger]

3/3 new Leica lenses, 2/2 new m bodies have serious to moderate issues & 10/10 customer serious service issues.  Waisted 18 months to get them all addressed, now I only keep 1 body and 2 lenses and made 2 system switched - for the quality and services I’m getting today, I never look back.  Good luck.

[Chimichurri]

I purchased my first Leica lens a few months back. Brand new. A 50f2. I don’t see any problems. 

Do you use a test chart?

[Stuart Richardson]

I think the M system is reaching the limits of its capabilities. You are still relying on a little rolled up piece of metal rolling on another piece of metal, to line up two images in a glass viewfinder that has a lower than 100% magnification. And you are expecting it to provide absolutely perfect focus from infinity to .7m with every lens and every body they make, over a frame of 64 million pixels, and do so consistently over years, survive shipping and handling, temperature shocks and daily use. It is a tough job. Increasingly, it seems, too tough. These problems (at least focus and calibration) vanish in mirrorless, as the camera can just read the optimum focus right off the sensor, and individual lens calibration and body calibration errors can be coded in to the lenses and bodies such that they each know each other's signature. A tolerance +4.7 lens and a tolerance -3.8 body can communicate to each other to focus at 0.0. You have no such luck with an M system. This has been for awhile now. My philosophy is now to test a lens and body rigorously immediately and return whatever does not work. I think Leica could always do a better job, but I truly think they are just starting to run up against the limits of practical possibility. If you are a very demanding user, you need to send them everything together, and they can usually make it work. It's either that or just keep trying lenses or bodies until they are spot on. This is not a new thing. In large format I had a client who used a 150mm APO Sironar S. I printed a show for him of 100x125cm prints that looked super sharp. LF lenses are rarely as sharp as 35mm or medium format, but this was. I tried 4 copies of the lens until I found one that was close. Those four lenses ranged from poor to mediocre to stunning. That was one of Rodenstock's most high end lenses... Similarly, back when I was shooting Sony I bought their expensive Zeiss 35mm 1.4, and it was so decentered and awful wide open that I returned it after a few days. I had bought it to shoot at night, and it was unusable. Still have not gotten anything at all like that from Leica. But sample variation is a thing, and until Leica starts selling things in matched pairs, or ditches the rangefinder for an evf or digital rangefinder patch, we are going to be dealing with it.

Edited November 12, 2022 by Stuart Richardson

[Auroralabs]

1 hour ago, Chimichurri said:

I purchased my first Leica lens a few months back. Brand new. A 50f2. I don’t see any problems. 

Do you use a test chart?

Yes, I use a test chart. It's the only way I can see if a lens is consistently back focusing or front focusing and then verify it's in proper calibration after I get it back from Leica NJ.

[sarav]

I've been using Leica for more than twenty years. The most of bodies I bought had rangefinder misaligned (Analog and digital bodies) but adjusting it by yourself is not a difficult task (a couple of minutes most of the time). As regards lenses I owned only two trouble ones which needed factory calibration: 75APO-Summicron and 75 Summilux. All the others, and they are many, are perfectly aligned out of the box. Maybe Infinity mark is not corresponding to infinity but if you do focus with a properly adjusted rangefinder the resulting picture is perfectly razor-sharp.

[thighslapper]

I gave up on RF Leicas because of this issue.

Both lenses and RF are adjusted to be within a tolerance range.

As a result if you have a lens that is at one end of the range and a camera that is at the other things will be hopelessly out.

It may have been OK in the days of film and when you went about snapping at f8 with a 35mm lens, but for digital it's not. 

I had to self calibrate every RF I bought (M9, M9P, Monochrom, M240 etc) to work with the lenses I had.

Once you get more than 3-4 lenses the chances of all of them working perfectly with any given body diminishes rapidly.....

..... and that doesn't include the lenses with additional floating elements that need calibrating for mid distance as well as near and infinity. 

The RF mechanism is crude in the extreme but easy to adjust once you have had some practice ..... but as others have said the mechanical nature of it has reached its limits as far as accuracy and adjustment is concerned. 

 

Edited November 14, 2022 by thighslapper

[sinjun]

19 minutes ago, thighslapper said:

Once you get more than 3-4 lenses the chances of all of them working perfectly with any given body diminishes rapidly.....

Agree with this with the qualification that we're talking about e.g. 50 f1.4, 90 f2.8 and equivalent or smaller depths of field. I test each lens and make notes about RF calibration. So far only my 50mm Summilux asph and 75mm Nokton are spot on. Those that require some manual compensation in use include 90mm tele-elmarit, 35mm Nokton f1.2, 35mm Summilux pre asph, 73mm MS optics Sonnetar, 50mm Summarit f1.5, not to mention those which have some focus shift issues and therefore some aperture-dependent compensation such as 50mm Sonnar-C.

For some lenses, such as 35mm Summilux, the softness wide open and therefore the absence of well-marked transitions in sharpness diminish the problem.  To an extent I take all these as part of the fun / challenge of using a rangefinder but for critical work would use an EVF or my Kolari-mod Sony A7S, and would be interested in an EVF only camera with the M footprint.

[Fotoklaus]

At this price point and those small numbers of products there should be a 100% QC, in my opinion.

[elmars]

You're expecting the impossible; no one is flawless (except me, of course, but I don't make expensive lenses).

[lct]

I don't count my M lenses anymore but i have less problems re RF or lens accuracy that some of you have folks, i must say, although i often use 100% crops in PP. This said, when using high res cameras, i don't expect rangefinders to be as accurate as a good EVF with focus magnification. Less and less people are challenging the obvious on this point fortunately but the others don't do service to the Leica community by letting believe that a rangefinder can be perfectly accurate at any aperture on a 60mp sensor. It is not a matter of price but of RF base length, visual acuity, focal length, aperture and circle of confusion.

[pedaes]

2 minutes ago, Al Brown said:

the end of the world is coming, I tell ya.

You heard it here first!

[hdmesa]

On 11/12/2022 at 5:20 AM, Al Brown said:

Decentered enough (one third of image frame slightly unsharp wide open at infinity on the corner) to be sent back to Leica, which of course said it is within tolerances. The owner did not find it acceptable for the price.

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That's unacceptable they said it was within spec. My guess is the 35 APO-M is so difficult to assemble, they're essentially refusing to service them. This lens is like a self-sealed unit – just throw it away if it's not right. Complete insanity that a lens designed to be the ultimate in image quality is "within spec" with a tilted element(s).

I just sent my new 35 APO-M back for a refund. At infinity, the left side of the frame was soft at f/2 but the right side was sharp. Who in their right mind would accept this as ok even for a $800 lens much less $8,000?

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[Dan Nelson]

My 35mm APO M came from the factory back focusing on my M10-R. It consistently back focused, at infinity and at all distances. I was shocked at how shoddy the QC was. The M10-R had just come back from a Leica USA CLA maybe a week before arrival of the APO, so that was within tolerances. I sent the lens and the M10-R to Leica USA and asked them to match the two together. They seemed to have missed that request, turned the M10-R around in a week and they sent the lens back to Wetzlar. After an 8 week turnaround time it came back. There's no way they "matched" the lens to the body. Fortunately, the lens now seems to be pretty accurate, although the extremely high acuity of the lens makes nailing the focus with the RF ever so evasive. See attached photos, full frame and wide open. The boy's left eye is tack sharp, and his right eye is slightly out of the depth of field. When the focus is critical, I use the Visoflex.

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