[Leica] Summarex

[Alastair Firkin <firkin@netconnect.com.au>]

g'day guys,

I'm a bit slow these days, and so the fire in the summarex comments will
have faded. I did a special report on this lens for my home page about 12
months ago, and travelled with the lens to Yosemite and Chicago, (as some
of you may remember). I did find the lens a bit on the heavy side for
travel, but prior to it, I've only used the Elmar C 90, which is the most
compact of 90's, even if it is a bit slow.

The Summarex is beautifully built. It has one quirk which takes a bit of
getting used to, and that is the aperture ring rotates the focus, so you do
need to set the aperture first, and focus later. For some reason, I
obviously tend to do the opposite, and it always takes me a few shots to
"settle-in". Here is what I said about it on the home page;

"The summarex was an early design [1941] for a fast, short telephoto for
the Leica system. Its production continued till 1960 with a total of 4342
lenes produced.

Mine is probably a later lens 940002.

It is quite a heavy "beast" weighing in at 810 gms [the heavy 75 summilux
is 625] or 1.75lbs, and it feels a bit unsafe on its thread mount. The lens
was always expensive, and good second-hand examples bring high prices. The
first 500 or so were black, and the rest finished in chrome. It has a
beautiful reversible hood, which locks on to the front element guided by
two small screw heads. The glass surface is very large, and has a faint
blue hue.

The focus is very "deliberate", but rotates the entire front of the lens,
including the f stop ring, which has click stops, but is firm enough to
alter the focus when set. You therefore must set exposure, focus and fire.
This is not such a problem with the older cameras, where exposure is made
away from the viewfinder, but doesn't always suit my M6 habits, when using
the lens with the bayonet adaptor.

Even towards the end of its production life, when the M3 was in full swing,
it was never given an M mount, signalling the companies focus did not lie
with the fast 85mm "king" of Summar's ;-)

Why buy the Summarex? This lens is flawed. Leica was prepared to axe it
even when it had no replacement. It was not a great performer at full
aperture, was expensive, heavy, and blocked a lot of the viewfinder on the
M3/4. Leica finally released a fast short telephoto 20 years after the King
was discontinued.

Until the release of the f1.4 Summilux, the Leica rangefinder user had to
make to with the 90 Elmarit and later Tele-elmarit, both of f2.8 speed.

Yes it is flawed, but it cost me less than half the price of a second-hand
Summilux--- it is a classic piece in a developing system, and still has its
uses.

I will be hoping to produce a series of images shot with this lens to
further develop this theme. Till then, you will have to put up with the
images taken from the concerts at this years Melbourne Festival. The Sumi
Jo images are very marked enlargements of negs made at about the same
distance as the Europe Galante shot. "

The one thing that attracted me to the lens, was the first shot I made with
it at the dealer. The resultant image was "unique". It did have a neon
glow, sometimes now achieved in photoshop, but the underlying image was
sharp. In some ways it almost looks like a flash shot made with the camera
on a slow shutter setting to use ambiant light. Fascinating, I find the
lens has  a use for portraits and at the theatre. Mine is not for sale ;-)

cheers

Alastair Firkin

http://users.netconnect.com.au/~firkin/AGFhmpg.html