Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/08/05
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 15:43 -0700 04-08-1997, dvcinc@swbell.net wrote: >Does anyone have any experience with or know anything about Leica's >latest, lower-priced (Ha) R zooms? Leica press releases and reviews are >obviously very complimentary. How do they compare to the current 28-70, >35-70 and 70-210? The 80-200 has been out for a while. The 35-70 f4 is >quite new. The lenses are made in Japan but by who? does anyone know? I >find the 70-180 is too heavy in both pounds and dollars to suit >me.Thanks. >Bob The latest 80-200 f/4.0 is made by Kyocera, Japan (the older one was made by Minolta). It generally obtains nice test results. The new 35-70 f/3.5 received excellent remarks by the French magazine R=E9ponses Photo (foto answers), they said it is a worthy complement to the beautiful R8. The 28-70 is very sharp (sharpest lens in this category), but suffers somewhat from flare and distorsion, according to test by the Belgian consumers union. =46rom a user of the 80-200 I heard that while he is very satisfied with its results, he would not buy it again because of the opening at f/4.0 which gives a very dark viewfinder image, and so makes focussing difficult under low light conditions. The same would be true for the other zooms I guess. The 70-180 gets super results, but is very heavy, much too heavy IMHO. I would never consider it for that reason. Why not use fix focals, which are lighter, more compact and give even better results? Pascal - ------------------------------------------ This message was created and sent on a Macintosh PowerBook - ------------------------------------------