Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/08/01
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 11:58 AM 8/1/97 -0400, JayPax@aol.com wrote: >Are you saying that Zeiss glass generally is better than Leitz glass or what? > What are the different standard that they designed their glass to in the >past. I thought that they were designed with generally the same design >characteristics. Please enlighten us. The Readers' Digest version is that Leitz did not have the capacity to develop extraordinally fine optics until the last 30 years. They thus built lenses, as Barnack used to say, "good enough for the purpose, and no better". Max Berek -- a microscope optician with no background in camera lenses -- used a simple trick of exagerrating the out-of-focus images to accentuate the sharpness of the in-focus image. This makes the in-focus portion seem substantially sharper than it is, and produces what Gianni Rogliatti calls the 'Leica Glow'. Zeiss, Voigtlander, Steinheil, and other established German houses deemed this a cheap trick, but the public loved the effect, and Leica's reputation for 'sharpness' was established. (This is a large part of the reason why Leica lenses did not test especially well in the early camera-magazine tests.) Zeiss, on the other hand, always has aimed at the absolute best performance on all optical parameters from its lenses. Thus, Zeiss lenses tend to be exceedingly expensive. Leitz lenses, on the other hand, tended to be a bit cheaper but produced images quite different from those brought about by Zeiss optics. By 1960, particularly due to the influence of the great Dr Walter Mandler at the Leitz works in Midland, Ontario, the emphasis had changed to producing lenses to the limit of optical abilities, and this has been emphasized in recent years. The director of design at Leica was hired away from a similar position at Zeiss, so the optical parameters used by the two firms are now quite similar. For instance, both Zeiss and Leitz now design by use of MTF. DISPUTED POINT: Many disagree with the following. I feel that the changes made to the more common lenses (2/35, 2/50, and 2/90) over the past thirty years have been made to produce GOOD results from lenses which are cheaper to make than their predecessors. Thus, I prefer the 2/50 DR to the current Summicron. Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!