[Leica] Thanks

[Mike Johnston <michaeljohnston@ameritech.net>]

I personally can't wait for the Konica. Although I love the M6, I prefer
an aperture-preferred AE camera, and I love Konica lenses--always have.

Incidentally, here's a brief bit of translation from the Japanese
website, courtesy of Oren Grad:

"All surfaces of all of the M-Hexanon interchangeable lenses are
multicoated;  from open aperture, flare and ghosts are suppressed and
high
contrast is secured.

"In every lens as well, spherical aberration being of the undercorrected

type, tangential and sagittal astigmatism being of the utmost
uniformity,
flare is suppressed at full aperture, and soft, natural boke [blur]
without
ni-sen [double-line] boke is secured.

"Also, far from SLR lenses which must accommodate the mirror housing,
the
flange-back is short, so aberration correction is well-secured, and
naturally, the strengths of fixed focal-length lenses being made the
most
of, distortion too is well-suppressed."

Thanks to the people who welcomed me back and asked about the "50mm
only" experiment (the last time I was on the LUG, I was talking about
using only a 50mm lens for a year). It's not really that much of a
stretch, as for me the basic question is whether to use only a 35mm lens
or only a 50mm lens. I've used 50mm almost exclusively this past year,
testing and reviewing duties aside...but I've used about 6 different
50mms.. Is that cheating? <s>

I actually did one assignment with a _zoom_ (ew!), and I'd like a pat on
the back for that, please.

Incidentally, in the next issue, in our "Collector Print Offer" series
(which has been popular beyond our wildest hopes, which explains why we
keep doing it), I'm going to be offering four prints of my own that
demonstrate, at least as far as I am able to do, examples of "reference
standard" optical quality in 35mm lenses. I'm having a devil of a time
deciding which lenses to include and which to leave out; so far I've
settled on pictures made with two Zeiss lenses (don't hiss, now, you
Leica people), the c. 1954 collapsible-mount 50mm Leica Summicron-M (now
you can applaud), and a lovely Pentax M42 screwmount lens that you can
buy these days for about $79. I would actually like to include an
example of the wonderful 50mm f/2 Olympus macro lens, but I don't seem
to have a suitable picture...most of my work is truly "personal" and in
most cases it would be a stretch to imagine anyone wanting to put my
artwork on their walls. I've tried to find pictures that are both good
examples of what the lens in question can do, but that are also fine
prints of pleasing subject matter. Not particularly easy, presuming that
most people would not want to buy photographs of my relatives!

Erg, I'm maundering. Sorry for using up all this bandwidth...

- --Mike J.