Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2006/11/27
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 05:13 PM 11/27/2006, Henning Wulff wrote: > >Watch out for the Russian ones. > >Otherwise there's no difference. Each lens (version) was designed one >time, with the main team either in Wetzlar/Solms or Midland. Then it >was generally manufactured in one country or the other. Sometimes >production was moved part way through the run, but the quality was >the same. > >At certain times the main design team was either in Germany or >Canada, and the designs from that era came from that country. The >design team and production were generally located in the same country. The 2.8/35 BK/Jupiter-12 was an exact clone of the Prewar 2.8/3.5cm Carl Zeiss Jena Biogon designed by Ludwig Bertele, arguably the most accomplished optical engineer of the 20th century -- Max Berek certainly so regarded him. This is a lens which is hard to beat, albeit Soviet quality control left a bit to be desired. (But, then, dum Iove nodat: one of my LTM versions of the CZJ lens has a lens mount crude enough to satisfy a colony of Cherrystone clams but probably no one more advanced than that -- the lens functions perfectly well but some village clearly was lacking its idiot, as only an idiot could have thought up that lens mount.) For most of its existence, E Leitz Midland used a core group of German optical designers assigned there from Wetzlar. There were some Canadian designers as well but I believe that, during the tenure of Walther Mandler, the core designers were always German, as was the case at Wetzlar. Marc msmall@aya.yale.edu Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!