As written before I stumbled across an old Elmar 3,5/3,5 (coated, but cleaning marks). I was quite stunned because of the optical quality it delivers, below are two pictures: One from the elmar, the other one from my Summaron-M 2,8/35. Which is which ? Anyone likes to guess ? Aperture is 5,6 (est. for the Elmar, speed 1/1000th) with my M2.

Picture #1

Picture #2

BTW, there are even screw-in filters for the old elmars available (which do not block the aperture settings), size 19*0.5 seems to fit, I have one from Heliopan and one from B&W

Kai

-- Kai Blanke (kai.blanke@iname.com), October 29, 2001

Answers

The Elmar was a Tessar 4 element lens which was extremely good, except that wide open it was a little dark in the corners. Okay for B&W, a definite no-no for color films. The Summaron corrected the vigneting problem, and may have been a little sharper at the edges, but at f:8 cannot be told apart. Nikon copied the Elmar for their 35mm/f:3.5 lens and must have sold a bigellion of them. Unlike the Elmar it was coated, and had a reputation for giving beautiful and smooth Kodachromes.

-- Bill Mitchell (bmitch@home.com), October 29, 2001.

Unfortuantely looking at very low rez screen images will not even differentiate between an exceptional lens and a poor one, let alone two good lenses. I don't think Leica made too many lenses that were not very sharp stopped down a stop or two. Maybe the original Hecktor 50mm? I had a 3.5 Summaron for a few years, and at f8 it was very close to a Summicron in sharpmness, contrast, color fidelity.The 2.8 version is noticeably better at the wider apertures.

-- Andrew Schank (aschank@flash.net), October 29, 2001.

Kai

There is no way to compare these two lenses based on a scanned picture viewed over a computer screen. As cited above, even if there were obvious differences, you would not be able to tell at that level of resolution.

The four-element 35/3.5 Elmar is a design that dates back to 1930! No doubt it was good in its day, but no match for a 1960s era lens like the six-element 35/2.8 Summaron. Naturally, stopped down, these differences would be reduced. The diaphragm is the great equalizer of lenses.

Interestingly, Leitz continued to produce 35/3.5 Elmars for a few years after the war. These lens were factory coated. Older pre-war Elmars are often found coated, since they were frequently sent back to the factory for coating after the war. That's a tribute to the longevity of Leica lens designs.

-- Eliot (erosen@lij.edu), October 29, 2001.

Picture #1 looks like the shadows are infused with more stray light, suggesting the older and less efficient anti-reflection coatings of the ELMAR.

Picture #2 looks contrastier, and also a bit crisper--suggesting the better coatings and better correctio of the Summaron.

After all, I've got a 50-50 chance anyhow, right?

-- Bob Fleischman (RFXMAIL@prodigy.net), October 29, 2001.

Here is the solution for those who may be interested:

Pic #1 is the Summaron, #2 is the Elmar. Due to the JPEG compression or scanning there may be little difference, but even under a loupe there is no real difference to see.

Interestingly there are no visible effects of the (clearly visible) cleaning marks on the back elemement - and the coatings of the Elmar seem to be pretty good. Does anyone have similar experience witch cleaning marks ?

Kai

PS: I found another post regarding the filter size of the Elmar, mentioned to be 18.5*0.45, which differs from my filters, but they seem to work nonetheless (since the difference is quite marginal).

-- Kai Blanke (kai.blanke@iname.com), October 29, 2001.

Kai,

The shot ID S01 was shot with a Summaron, the ID S02 was shot with an Elmar. The second picture is looking worse than the first one. Look at the cross placing in the top right corner of the picture. I do see that the three thin diagonal beams being on the upper right side of the cross, as well as the three opposite lower ones aren't noticeable. This is a feature of the triplet design lens while the symmetric Hauss-design lens has almost equal both as sagittal so tangential frequency-contrast characteristics. The tiny beams of the cross are almost fully visible on the first picture, and in common it has a better contrast. Thanks for the good example.

Victor.

-- Victor Randin (ved@enran.com.ua), October 30, 2001.