[Leica] Re: back again

[Cummer Family <cummer@asiaonline.net>]

Hello Luggers,
I am back in Hong Kong from my annual world circumnavigation. In London I
had a drink - several in fact - with Alex Brattell, but Doug Richardson
missed his train and couldn't make it. In Vancouver I had lunch with
Henning and Tom and we took lots of pictures of each other with a variety
of Leica and other equipment. In the UK I used my Hexar and M6HM
interchangeably and confess I prefer the Leica viewfinder. That shouldn't
be a surpise to owners of both Leica and the Hexar. There may be a M6 0.58
in my future yet, but the Hexar performed very well - and there were no
back focus problems with my various lenses - a mixture of Leica and
Voigtlander plus one orphan Ricoh 28. On a whim, I bought the Contax T -3
the day I left Hong Kong and I found myself using it a lot because it was
so easy to carry around. The lens, a 35mm f2.8 Zeiss Sonnar produces Leica
like images - the only thing that bothered me about the little camera was
the shutter time lag as the lens moved into focus position. With the T 2
you can set it so that the lens moves into position before you take the
picture and then you can wait for the decisive moment. In Vancouver, I
played with Tom's Bessa T - not my cup of tea, I'm afraid, and tried
Henning's 75 summilux on the Hexar. His lens worked fine in the close
range. Since returning to Hong Kong I have had the Hexar in to get its
vertical alignment adjusted - 12 hours in the overhead bin of the 747
jiggled it slightly out of alignment. The M6HM in the same bag was not
affected. This was a 20 minute walk in job at the Konica repair center and
this time I watched as the cover was taken off. I think next time I may be
able to do the adjustment myself. My new 75 Summilux was back from Solms on
my return with a note that it was within spec. The long suffering Mr. Yu,
head technician at Schmidt, took my M6HM and the 75mm and tested that they
mated correctly. The close focus problem that I experienced, Mr. Yu
explained, is because the lens will rotate closer than 2.5 feet and then
although the focusing cam of the M6 appears to give a correct rangefinder
image in fact the lens and the rangefinder have decoupled as far as
accuracy is concerned. So, we agreed that Leica should have built in a stop
at 2.5 feet - but they didn't. Owners of the 75 can see this by looking at
the focusing cam in the lens and noting that it slopes upward to the left
from 2.5 feet and slightly upwards to the right at less than 2.5 feet. So
now I am going out to take some more pictures with the 75 and I will always
be checking that I am not focusing closer than 2.5 feet. 
Anyway it is nice to be back 
Cheers
Howard Cummer.