[Leica] widest lens used?

[passaro.vince at gmail.com (Vince Passaro)]

Very informative and convinving, thank you. I'm taking that as the
definitive word on the 21 topic.

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 1:52 PM, Henning Wulff <henningw at 
archiphoto.com>wrote:

> Some years ago I did a comparison for the LHSA Viewfinder of four 21mm
> lenses: the CV 21/4, Ricoh 21/3.5, SA f/3.4 and Elmarit ASPH f/2.8. I used
> to have the older Elmarit, and had compared that lens to the ASPH and SA
> separately, indicating that that lens would have ended up in last place.
> Some other 21's such as the Kobalux lenses also would not have touched the
> ASPH, but some samples were quite good.
>
> The Ricoh was the poorest in most respects, but not by a large margin, and
> the ASPH was definitely the best in most respects. The SA and CV lenses 
> each
> had strong points and weak points, but both were very useable. Since then
> I've tried a number of newer lenses like the Zeiss 21's, both of which can
> compete very well with the Elmarit ASPH and are definitely better than the
> CV 21. But again, they're larger, and the Biogon is even slower.
>
> The main problem I've seen with the CV is decentering, which unfortunately
> affects many other CV products. A lot of samples need some stopping down to
> bring some corners into good performance. That's were a lot of the money
> goes with Leica lenses.
>
> In comparison to the 15 and 12mm lenses, I find that the 21 a) has a lot of
> competition, which the others don't, and b) there's not a lot of difference
> in performance, and certainly the 21 and 15 have a quite similar character.
>
> As for Ken Rockwell's 'tests' and 'opinions', the less said the better.
>
>
>   *            Henning J. Wulff
>  /|\      Wulff Photography & Design
>  /###\   mailto:henningw at archiphoto.com
>  |[ ]|     http://www.archiphoto.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information
>