Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1996/10/06
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 12:56 AM 10/7/96 BST-1, you wrote: >"Where's Helmut today?" > >"Oh he went camping in the forrest, and his chemical toilet >exploded...very messy apparently" ROFL! That's a good one, and makes a good point. >That Nikon don't make a 'Leica look' lens says more about marketing than >it does about witchcraft. As a Nikon user I expect a new lens to look the >same as the other Nikon lenses, if I bought a 105mm f1.8 (for example) to >go between my 85mm F1.4 and my 135mm f2, I'd be a bit pissed off if it >looked dramatically different. That's the whole point. There are some things about the Leica look that distinguish it form other lines. For example, Zeiss lenses tend to be more blue (or I suspect more cyan - biasing towards cyan can make pictures look sharper) though Blake Ziegler, the head honcho Contax rep in the U.S. who is credited with the G1 being mostly his idea and bringing it to fruition, would tell you Zeiss, er Contax, is neutral, and Leica is too warm. It's a matter of opinion. But for the Leica look, it's something else. It's the way edge sharpness is modulated by the lens. The picture has a presence that other lines just can't duplicate. Why? Because they don't want to. They have other goals. >From economy, to different biases, or they use a common lens coating formulae for every lens element - which make quality more difficult to obtain. Another thing is the way a lens renders out of focus part of the image. Different lenses do it differently. Some people will tell you the M 35 Summicron has the best out of focus images of any lens on the market. That's disputable, but the quality itself is self-evident. It does look different. But to objectify the Leica look, we'd have to be inside the designer's heads. It's not important. Look at the results, and come up with your own labels for how a lens renders a subject. How it looks in the slide and on print is more important. If your pictures are on 4x6 automat prints, forget it. You won't see it. If they are hand-printed by you or some expert, or are slides projected with quality lenses, then there's going to be something there. If you like it, then the money spent is worth it. Otherwise, well...buy an F5 and shoot 8 frames per second. Something good is bound to come out. :-) Not. >"if we were to take a Leica lens and a Nikon lens (for example), and >managed to find two specimens which tested exactly the same in every >particular that science knows how to test, does that mean that the images >would be completely indistinguishable? Not necessarily at all." Absolutely right, unless you really test for everything. There would have to be a difference somewhere, or they would be identical. But that's not possible even with modern lens manufacturing techniques. Similar lenses from the same manufacturer will be different, no matter how small those differences might be. >I wager you wouldn't be able to tell the difference but then when I tried >it they *didn't* test the same, that's why they look different! But as has been said over and over again, people do see the difference. Not necessarily so they can identify which lens did which picture, but that they are different. =========== Eric Welch Grants Pass, OR