DezFoto

That lens has really bad coma, which can cause a lot of undesirable effects when shot wide open. It's the trade off for a simple lens design with a large maximum aperture in a compact body.

I've never understood positions like this, no lens is perfect and just because a lens is expensive or has been used by a famous photographer, doesn't mean that it's beyond reproach or is ideal for us mere mortal photographers. I have several Leica lenses that have a hard time controlling flair, especially the older designs. Leica has never been able to match Zeiss when it comes to lens coatings and sometimes it's just not worth sacrificing your composition because of a lens that can't control flair effectively. As a photographer, it's better to use equipment that allows you to work the way you want to, rather than having to conform your photography to the way the equipment requires you to work. Remember, it's you that's creating art, not the camera/lens.

Thank you for your considered response and details of your experiences. I agree with most, if not all of your points and I think it's safe to say that DJ Optical is cutting corners when it comes focus calibration and I assume that is why they are providing a means for users to adjust their lenses on their own. That being said, I do understand why they would and the result is that we can purchase this lens for around $300, which I think is a reasonable trade-off. As for your Jupiter-8 experiences, your lens must have already been shimmed to work with Leica bodies, as the physical flange distance is different between Leica cameras and Russian bodies they were originally designed for, so any unadjusted Jupiter lens would back-focus by default.

Live on in blissful ignorance and the fulfilling enjoyment of finding offence on the internet at every reference that could possibly be self-applied.

I never said YOU were whinging, did I? My digital rangefinders have gotten knocked out of calibration on a regular basis, my M6 has only been calibrated once and that was when I did the MP rangefinder upgrade. Again, as I already posted, film is much more forgiving of calibration and focus errors. My point is about body calibration is that unless you make sure both your lens AND your body are calibrated within spec, you're likely to run into problems. The calibration on bodies drifts out of spec over time, unless the camera lives in a display case and is never used.

I find it doubtful that an old Jupiter-8 lens focussed correctly on a digital body without being calibrated and likely the cams re-ground to current specs at some point. That being said, and f/2 lens would have an almost 2-stop DOF advantage over an f/1.1 lens and therefore would be much more forgiving of small focus calibration problems and focus shift. Furthermore, because of the Jupiter-8's somewhat telecentric design, the falloff between in-focus to out-of-focus is more gradual, which again makes it more forgiving of small calibration or focus errors.

Leica does what they can, unfortunately during the mere act of shipping a body to a customer, a rangefinder can be knocked slightly out of spec. Leica used to also have looser tolerances for calibration because film was more forgiving to focus calibration than digital. Unless you send your body to Leica to be calibrated along with your brand new lenses, they're likely not going to be 100% calibrated together. Just a fact of life, not a flaw in Leica's QC. Your comment though, exactly illustrates my point about people buying Leica gear and then whinging about focus problems because of their ignorance of how tight tolerances have to be with a rangefinder body and lens on a digital camera. If you want fewer calibration problems, buy slower lenses.

In a perfect world, that would be great but unfortunately it doesn't work that way, which is why I've received several brand new lenses from Leica that did not focus correctly on my body, despite my other lenses focussing correctly. There's a reason my local tech charges me $250 for a lens calibration and requires my body to do so, he knows that if calibrates it to his body with a collimator it will not necessarily focus correctly on any of my Leicas. It's not hard to calibrate a lens to spec, or to a body, it's just TIME CONSUMING and limits the number of lenses you can get out of your factory in a day, which means that each lens costs more money to produce.

I think it's fairly obvious, Time = Money. If you're spending time fine calibrating each lens to a median benchmark, you're spending money and therefore, increasing your manufacturing costs. Compound that with the fact that the lens is still going to have slightly off focus when delivered because each body's rangefinder is likely not 100% in spec, and you end up with people complaining about their lens not focusing correctly. This way everyone gets to adjust their lens to their individual body in a few minutes and DJ Optical spends less labour on each lens and listens to fewer complaints. As for Cosina lenses, a simple price comparison should answer your question, for instance I paid 3X the cost of the 7Artisans' for my VC 1.1/50. Also, a lot of their lenses have had focus issues on digital bodies, if you remember.

It's very quick and easy to adjust focus, it's a general setting for the lens and I would imagine they did this to avoid spending a lot of time in the factory adjusting the focus just to have people whinge about focus being off when their copies arrive because it's not playing nice with their particular camera's rangefinder.

The photos are fine as long as you temper your expectations. Images from it are about as far from a modern Leica lens as you can get, with lots of coma, astigmatism and residual spherical aberrations. BUT, that's how you get that "glow" around edges and the vintage "swirly bokeh". Colours are muted and skewed warm (but not Canon yellow/orange warm, thank god). Global contrast is low, even stopped down and vignetting is high until around F5.6. It's not particularly sharp or contrasty at any aperture. It's essentially a retro special effects lens, kind of a lesser version of the old rangefinder Canon 1.2/50.

This is a thread about a non-Leica M mount lens, I think all posts about that lens are relevant to the thread. There are also several non-Leica sections of this forum, so apparently the creators of the forum do not have your strict interpretation of what this forum is for. We are all lovers of photographer here and fortunately no one person’s interpretation holds dominion. If this post is so inconvenient to you, then there are several other threads that available that would suit your sensibilities better and you are welcome to enjoys those instead.

It’s useful for Leica shooters considering this lens if they can see examples, regardless of which body it’s mounted to.

The Manhattan Beach Pier in Los Angeles. Leica M-P (typ 240) and Nikkor 24-70 f/2.8 G

Hi Charles, so you know, most photographers would consider it very disrespectful of their art when you take an image of theirs and edit it without their permission.