[Leica] Re: Jupiter-3 image quality

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

Tom Finnegan <tomf@piengr.com> wrote:

>I started off by buying a 50/1.5 Jupiter-3 off of EBay for $75... I
was pleasantly surprised to see how well the Jupiter performed in
practice
for a lens that was designed in the 1930's and built in 1956.

The patent date on the Sonnar (of which the Jupiter is a copy) is
1933, so you're talking about early 1930s optical technology.

A couple of weeks back I was taking some photos in the British Museum.
Most of the time I used a Noctilux, but for four subjects I took the
same pic with the Noctilux, a pre-war uncoated 5cm Sonnar lens, and
with a Russian (coated) Jupiter-3 Sonnar copy, and with the Noctilux.

Once the slides had been processed, I shuffled each of the four
'shoot-offs' into random order, then used a lupe to sort them in terms
of perceived image quality. There was no clear winner, so I concluded
that the small amount of variation I was seeing between the three
lenses was probably the effect of camera shake at 1/30 sec.

When I get some more free time, I might repeat the exercise under more
controlled conditions, and a subject where I can use a tripod to
eliminate camera shake.

Of course, in the era when lenses were hand assembled, there could be
significant variations between individual examples, and this was
probably particularly true for Soviet factories.

Regards,

Doug Richardson