What is the best JUPITER-12

mabelsound said:
Yes, I had indeed read that. I just wasn't sure if it was true for the entire Bessa line. I will probably be ordering an R3M tomorrow and am mulling over my options...
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AFAIK it's true for all Bessas. As noted above, the CV f/2.5 Skopar is a very good option in 35mm ... one of my favorites and a great value for the money.

If you're on a budget, and you aren't married to the 35mm focal length, I would highly recommend either an Industar-61 or Jupiter-8. Two very good 50's. Of the two, I prefer the Jupiter-8, but both are winners. You'll need to get an adapter, of course.
 
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timmyd18 said:
i've gotta agree with ondrej on this one, we're talking about equipment that ranges from 20-75 years old here and the life history of each piece of equipment is very very important. i don't have a j-9, but isn't a primary bit of trouble with one usually that someone took it apart and didn't put it back together correctly? this has much more to do with whether a j9 is usable today or not than what it was like when it left the factory.

what i love about FSU equipment i don't think can be described by asking what the best stuff is. it's more... how does this piece of equipment change how i take photographs? i've had very different experiences with my Fed-2 that had light leaks until Jay helped me, my perfect Fed-5c, and my battered Kiev 4am/ J12 setup which has taken some of my best rangefinder pictures to date. i love having multiple FSU cameras(and my argus c3) with me at a variety of focal lengths and seeing how the world changes with each.

if that's how you look at it, it doesn't really matter what is the best j12 out there. my '71 J12 is fine. so is my Fed2 with t-shirt paint on the shutter. i've loved using them.

freestyle photo put it right in their description of photo-taking with a holga. they call it a collaboration between a unique (ie in that every holga has some strange quirk) camera and the photographer. i'm not trying to say a high quality camera like the Fed2 is similar to a Holga, but i'd approach using the two in a similar way. see what you can get out of each camera.
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You do not have to have someone taking a lens apart and puting it back together wrong to have a bad FSU lens.
I own a brand new J-9 bought in 1991 that was made in that year and it is totally useless because the collimation is off.
 
good point, i guess if they left the factory wrong to begin with, thats important too! i'm sorry about that, i bet it was really disappointing when you realized the lens was bad.
but i still think that this is a problem with a particular lens that can't really be generalized to all 1991 lenses.
 
timmyd18 said:
good point, i guess if they left the factory wrong to begin with, thats important too! i'm sorry about that, i bet it was really disappointing when you realized the lens was bad.
but i still think that this is a problem with a particular lens that can't really be generalized to all 1991 lenses.
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Remember, 1991 was around the time the USSR just stopped being and everything seemed to be for sale, the good stuff and the rejects.
I must have landed one of the rejects.
the price was not very high and I am sure it can be collimated.
 
i guess you can look at it as that you own a part of history; a soviet lens from a time when the soviets had other things on their minds

it's kind of like having a jersey from the "unified team" of the 1992 albertville olympics, or one of the eastern european flags with a hole in them where the communist shield was ripped off

tim
 
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