[Leica] 20mm Russar - has it been recomputed?

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

There have been some comments recently concerning the quality of the
20mm MR-2 Russar. I bought one a few weeks ago from Mr Cad, a dealer
here in the UK. They imported a batch of 40 in 1998, and mine was the
18th they'd sold. The saelesman assured me I could return it if I
wasn't happy with it, and said that they'd had no returns so far. The
first MR-2 I tried at the store had a focusing mount which felt rough,
but a second proved acceptably smooth once operated from one end to
another a few dozen times.

I tried it out last week, and the resulting Ektachromes look fine
Sharpness is variable from slide to slide, but that's more likely to
be the effects of camera shake than any deficiency in the lens since I
was working all the time either at f5.6 or 8. A shot of Oxford Street
taken at full aperture shows good sharpness except for a small area at
the extreme right-hand edge of the frame

One reason I opted to use reversal film was that I wanted to check for
vignetting. Marx James Small had written in an earlier posting that
"As is endemic to the Topogon breed, it is a bit slow and suffers from
about a one to one-and-a-half stop drop at the corners." Looking at
the sky in the corners of the image I can see no reduction in
brightness. I seem to recall Marc saying that the Russar had ben
returned to production in the early 1990s. Given the absence of
visible darkening in the corners of the frame, I wonder if 1990s
production is with a recomputed version. Have other Russar users
noticed vignetting, and if so what date is your lens?

The only complaint I have about my purchase is that the finder is
near-useless. This is a different version that that originally shipped
with Russars. It is conical, with a chrome trim, and a black body made
from metal. It has no manufacturer's logo, but is marked with a serial
number. The virtual image on which the eye must try to focus was far
too close for comfort, and causes eystrain.

Regards,

Doug Richardson