[Leica] Re: Jupiter 85mm f2

["Doug Richardson" <doug@meditor.demon.co.uk>]

"roland" <roland@dnai.com> wrote:

>I just acquired a Jupiter 85mm f 2 and in my first tests stopped down
for the outdoors have found it to be very sharp.

It’s a Russian copy of one of the great pre-war Zeiss lenses - the
85mm Sonnar - so it has the potential of being very good. However the
quality of individual examples is variable given the state of Soviet
quality-control (superb for military products, poor for civil).

At the Paris air show this year I used the Jupiter to photograph the
radar in the nose of an Israeli fighter. This was outdoors with the
lens stopped down. Taking a magnifier to the commercial 4 x 6 "sausage
machine" print, I can read every word on the radar's serial number
plate!

On thing you need to keep in mind is that at f2 the depth of field is
very shallow. To try the Jupiter out at ‘full-bore’, I took a photo of
a presenter at a press conference. The quality of the result was
acceptable but not great - than I realised that at a range of 10ft,
her natural body movements probably exceeded the available depth of
field.

When I later tried the lens out more carefully the results were
variable (the amount of camera shake I generate is often a limitation
on image sharpness) but one image taken at f2 is every bit as sharp as
I could ask. For a lens computed in the early 1930s, it's an
impressive result.

My rangefinder lenses are now a curious mixture of Russian, Japanese,
and Leitz products. Since I couldn’t justify the cost of buying a
complete range of lenses in both screw and bayonet fitting, I opted
for screw mount. Unfortunately the Leitz decision to abandon
screw-mount lens production around 1960 means that the designs
available were in many cases either relatively slow, or very expensive
because Leitz had made them in such small quantities that they had
become prized collectors’ items.

Regards,

Doug Richardson