Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/04/05
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Someone referred to this 2.8/180 as a "long telephoto lens". It is important to bear in mind that other views do not see such a lens in this category. The late Theo Kisselbach, one of the fathers of the Leica system in its salad days once referred to the 4.5/20cm Telyt of the era as a "moderately long lens", and stated that he preferred the term LONG focus for lenses beyond 30cm in focal length. Leitz was slow to adopt the telephoto format. A telephoto lens is a lens with a compressed optical path: it is physically shorter than its focal length. Zeiss loved the idea but, then, Zeiss had a huge design department and a lot of researchers to work out the best formulae. Leitz was much smaller and had much leaner resources, so they stuck with long-focus lenses: a 40cm Telyt ran out to 40cm (roughly 16 inches) from the film plane. This has changed in recent years (the past four decades or so) as Leitz/Leica has enjoyed the fruits of its early investment in computer-aided design. I tend to agree with Kisselbach. A 180 lens is a daily user. The longer stuff such as that 40cm Telyt, is for special occasions. Marc msmall at aya.yale.edu Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!