50/1.5 Jupiter J-3 LTM back in production at Lomo

[xayraa33]

.. not 100% true tho - the americans held south east germany up to the river Elbe (remember Capa's famous picture of a dead soldier in Leipzig)
It was then traded for West Berlin or so (I have to check that part again tho), but yes then the Zeiss factories in Jena were in Russian territory

There was a lot of wheeling and dealing going on amongst the allies on dividing the spoils.

Other stories and theories from that time are that General Patton was thwarted by General Eisenhower in Patton's attempt to get to Berlin before the Soviets.
In order to placate Stalin, the 3rd Army was also supposedly ordered to a halt as it reached the German border and thus was prevented from seizing either Berlin or Prague, moves that could have prevented Soviet domination of Eastern Europe after the war, so the story goes.

 

[Dante_Stella]

Perhaps, but the last Jupiter 3s were made in the Soviet union in 1988, not that long ago. And the current KMZ/Zenit plant has continued making optical devices all these years. The Zenit camera with Helios lens was made at least up until the late 1990s. It's like when Nikon reissues a classic lens, or Smith and Wesson an old style revolver - they're in a better position to do it than these flash in the pan Kickstarter projects that are run by a kid with no experience and a marketing glimmer in his eye.

That's actually not true - Nikon's S3 project actually required a ton of reconstruction and reengineering because the tooling was gone and almost everyone who had worked on it was dead. Nikon's records were incomplete enough that it had to reverse-engineer the S3 and SP from examples it bought at camera stores:

http://imaging.nikon.com/history/chronicle/history-s3/
http://imaging.nikon.com/history/chronicle/history-sp/

Nikon's attention to detail was obsessive. More so than Leica's when it was making the Null Series.

That will not be the case with the J-3+. I think you'll see when it comes out (if it's not already apparent in the pictures) that the lens will be a facsimile of the old one but pretty much designed from the ground up. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's a stretch to say that KMZ would be any better placed than a complete stranger to build a Jupiter-3. That said, there is a very good chance it could be better than the original.

Dante

 

[goamules]

Perhaps. But here's the point. An optics company, that has made optics since WWII, knows how to make more optics. That's their business, to make lenses. Also, their city has has generations of managers, workers, sub-vendors all living there. They can call up old timers if they have questions about something. They have the same buildings, the same file cabinets full of engineering drawings. The company is literally and figuratively geared to make the Jupiter-3. Lomo isn't. Kodak isn't. Microsoft isn't. If you want a rocket engine, you go to to Rocketdyne. You want a Jupiter 3, you go to the company that used to build them, and still builds optics.

America once had a big optical town, Rochester NY. Dozens of companies were formed, split, spawned as workers and inventors moved around making their life's work. The entire town was about film photography for almost a century. Now it's a rust belt. But you'd still be better off making a new film there, rather than St. Louis, or Dallas.

Nikon was trying to rebuild a metal bodied rangefinder last made in what, 1958? They had moved on to digital, plastic cameras. They weren't even making film cameras at at point where they? Focal plane shutters were long gone. Machines to stamp the metal parts were long gone. Of course it was difficult. KMZ is simply making another lens, with cemented glass elements, just like any lens they made in the past couple of years. Nothing is different except the design, of which I'm sure they've made dozens. They have optical engineers and manufacturing equipment. They machine a mount, just like all the other metal mounts. The last J-3s were built in 1988 or 1990. Making another lens is a big, big difference compared to Nikon's attempt to make a 1958 retro film camera.

That's actually not true ...it's a stretch to say that KMZ would be any better placed than a complete stranger to build a Jupiter-3. ...

Do me a favor, pray tell who you think would be better positioned to re-initiate production of a Jupiter 3 lens? (warning, you're talking to a person who worked in manufacturing engineering for a while!)

 

[Austerby]

Years ago I was arguing that Leica should resurrect its old formulas and start producing new editions of Hectors, Summars, Summarits etc, flaws and all but with character as a separate line from the uber-digital flawless masterpieces.

Lomo are doing just this concept but with non-Leica lenses. I have the Petzval and love it, and will definitely get this new J-3.

 

[David Hughes]

Hi,

I never knew that the British got Leica...

Many people here were unable to get their hands on new Leicas from about 1940/41 until 1952 or perhaps 1951. The USA got most of them and we went without. And I vaguely recall reading that the USA got/took their pick of Carl Zeiss machinery and staff days before their Allies the USSR went to collect them but I could be wrong. It was an article somewhere on the www linked into a Kiev thread somewhere here.

Regards, David

 

[raid]

This thread finally made me remove from the closet 5cm RF lenses that are Zeiss or FSU clones. I have at least twenty such lenses, and I do not believe that I will miss out somehow by not ordering a new 5cm lens. They are fun to use.

The original J-3 is not "better" than a vintage Zeiss 5cm/1.5 in any aspect except maybe having lenses in ltm without having to use an adapter Contax to ltm. Is there any other reason for using a J-3 over a Zeiss 5cm lens if you own both lenses?

 

[xayraa33]

Hi,

I never knew that the British got Leica...

Many people here were unable to get their hands on new Leicas from about 1940/41 until 1952 or perhaps 1951. The USA got most of them and we went without. And I vaguely recall reading that the USA got/took their pick of Carl Zeiss machinery and staff days before their Allies the USSR went to collect them but I could be wrong. It was an article somewhere on the www linked into a Kiev thread somewhere here.

Regards, David

The British forces had Leitz in Wetzlar under their jurisdiction right after the second world war and so a good while later they requisitioned the design to the Leica IIIb and shipped it off to Reid & Sigrist in Leicester to make a replica.




http://www.l39sm.co.uk/about_reid.php

The Reid 35mm camera has always been considered to be one of the better copies of the Leica Barnack type cameras, they even out did Nicca and Leotax.

 

[Dante_Stella]

Do me a favor, pray tell who you think would be better positioned to re-initiate production of a Jupiter 3 lens? (warning, you're talking to a person who worked in manufacturing engineering for a while!)

Garrett -

As a production engineer, surely you can appreciate that a lens designed to reach 30 lp/mm, finished crudely, and cranked out in command-economy factories in as large numbers as humanly possible is going to embody very little long-term know-how that you would want to put in a new product built in the low-thousands quantity, even if it were a revival of the old one. Even by the mid-70s, the quality of the Jupiter-3 had dropped off precipitously. Has there ever been a good Valdai (post-1975)? Ask Sweeney.

Having taken a Jupiter-3 down to its component parts once (don't start this at night), I observed that the mechanics (aside from the iris) are about 40 parts (give or take - this was 10 years ago), almost all of which are threaded and/or slotted tubes and rings that would pose no challenge in an era of CAD and CNC. If you consider that Chinese LTM adapter manufacturers can hold to a 0.005mm consistency across copies of the same model adapter, even after plating (I've measured this), there is nothing in a Jupiter's metal parts that should pose a challenge.

The Jupiter-for-Zorki barrel (the original one) is also built around accommodating the optical unit that screws into a Contax style barrel. There is little or no point to that today. So your design might come back even cleaner.

The optics? They would have to be redone today. The focal length change would be a slight redesign, but unless you have access to blanks in all of the right original refractive indices (these are actually laid out in patent 1,975,678 for the 1933 Sonnar - which was more than enough for Canon, Nikon and Zunow to go on to design their own versions), you're going be redesigning the thing anyway. And not shockingly, there have been advances in coatings and glass types that have obviated a slavish devotion to the original, labor-intensive design and yet resulted in higher performance. You can see this in the ZM and Sonnetar versions, which cut the element count and reduce the cementing.

So maybe you can convince me otherwise, but I think this is going to be a ground-up facsimile, not something that relies on old timey knowledge. KMZ is a natural fit as a low-cost producer in approximately the right geographic location to make it "historical," (particularly if ZOMZ doesn't make lenses anymore) but other than perhaps owning the trade name, it's hard to say what makes KMZ compelling.

D

 

[Dante_Stella]

This thread finally made me remove from the closet 5cm RF lenses that are Zeiss or FSU clones. I have at least twenty such lenses, and I do not believe that I will miss out somehow by not ordering a new 5cm lens. They are fun to use.

The original J-3 is not "better" than a vintage Zeiss 5cm/1.5 in any aspect except maybe having lenses in ltm without having to use an adapter Contax to ltm. Is there any other reason for using a J-3 over a Zeiss 5cm lens if you own both lenses?

Agreed. The quality of an Amedeo adapter is higher than any mechanical part in an older Jupiter LTM, and the fit, finish, and quality of postwar Zeiss Contax lenses is miraculous compared to Zorki lenses. What's more amazing is that your chances of getting a random Zeiss lens to work with an Amadeo adapter and a digital M (three parts that have never seen each other before) are astronomically higher than finding an old Jupiter-3 that works on a Leica the first try.

The new one should change that equation a bit.

Dante

 

[raid]

I started a while ago to slowly add modern lenses to what I already own and use, as I want options and new tools. I added a Zeiss 35/2 ZM and a CV 50/1.1 to what I had as "modern", such as a CV 50/1.5. There is nothing wrong with using old and new. My camera bag is currently housing M8 with ZK 5cm/1.5 ltm, while the M9 has a CV 50/1.1.

 

[David Hughes]

The British forces had Leitz in Wetzlar under their jurisdiction right after the second world war and so a good while later they requisitioned the design to the Leica IIIb and shipped it off to Reid & Sigrist in Leicester to make a replica.




http://www.l39sm.co.uk/about_reid.php

The Reid 35mm camera has always been considered to be one of the better copies of the Leica Barnack type cameras, they even out did Nicca and Leotax.

Hi,

Yes, I agree about the drawings but we didn't get many cameras and I reckon they were more important. One or two in my collection are pre-war and repaired with whatever we could get our hands on. Not that I was that interested in Leica cameras in 1951.

Regards, David

 

[sevo]

The British forces had Leitz in Wetzlar under their jurisdiction right after the second world war .

No. Wetzlar was first reached by US troops, who then were temporarily (until the end of the war) replaced by French rearguard units as the front moved eastwards. The British never got there, and did not get under French jurisdiction either, but permanently remained in the US occupied zone.

The British simply got access to the Leica thanks to the Wannsee conference, which granted all allies access to German inventions and secrets captured by any other ally.

 

[xayraa33]

Hi,

Yes, I agree about the drawings but we didn't get many cameras and I reckon they were more important. One or two in my collection are pre-war and repaired with whatever we could get our hands on. Not that I was that interested in Leica cameras in 1951.

Regards, David

I think that the British government was concerned about money leaving the land and going to foreign lands for non essential goods.

They had a large outstanding monetary debt to the USA after the WW 2 for war materiel and British exports were highly encouraged to obtain foreign currency, mainly to the USA

So it was a case of import as little as possible, but export as much as possible.

It was the same thing in the 1950s in Britain for importing the desirable American guitars, they only became widely available in around 1960/61 in the UK.

 

[xayraa33]

No. Wetzlar was first reached by US troops, who then were temporarily (until the end of the war) replaced by French rearguard units as the front moved eastwards. The British never got there, and did not get under French jurisdiction either, but permanently remained in the US occupied zone.

The British simply got access to the Leica thanks to the Wannsee conference, which granted all allies access to German inventions and secrets captured by any other ally.

That is not what I have read, but anything is possible, as I was not there in person to verify it. There was a lot of wheeling and dealing and horse trading amongst the allies for the spoils of war, as I mentioned in my previous post above.

Here are a few lines from that Reid camera article that I posted a hyper-link to in my previous post:





"The Leitz factory in Wetzlar had fallen into British hands in 1945 and was investigated and its manufacturing facilities and techniques researched. A late 1946 British Intelligence Report summarises that that "The Team left England on the 15th November, 1946 and returned on the 28th November, 1946. "



* Regarding the Wannsee conference, maybe that explains the unusual time lag from the end of the war to the British getting the Leica drawings to Reid & Sigrest.

 

[jarski]

cant comment who got where first or second, but fascinating reading 🙂

Petzval was good and original idea from Lomo and I thank them for making it. this new Jupiter not as much. sure they could have dug little deeper into historical lenses and find something more interesting.

 

[xayraa33]

cant comment who got where first or second, but fascinating reading 🙂

Petzval was good and original idea from Lomo and I thank them for making it. this new Jupiter not as much. sure they could have dug little deeper into historical lenses and find something more interesting.

The J-3 is a nice lens to re-manufacture, especially if it is better constructed than the original specimen and without the shimming caveat.

I am waiting for Lomo to sub contract a clone of the Leitz Thambar 90mm f2.2 if that is possible from a technical, production cost to number of sales ratio and patent infringement perspective. 🙂

 

[Out to Lunch]

Lomo are marketeers and hype sellers. This lens at the advertised price is a joke.

 

[Huss]

Lomo are marketeers and hype sellers. This lens at the advertised price is a joke.

Why?

It is about $150 cheaper than the next available NEW 50mm 1.5 lens, and is the only new fast 50mm lens made in the LTM mount.

Every company has a hype/marketing dept. It's how we know what is available whether it is from an innocuous press release to a worldwide campaign.

 

[uhoh7]

Lomo are marketeers and hype sellers. This lens at the advertised price is a joke.

Yeah, hype and high lens markup is something we should reserve for Sony :bang:

 

[goamules]

Yes, Lomo learns (and sometimes creates) what is hot on the used market, but is no longer made. Then they partner with an optics company to make a new one. It's very smart marketing. Other companies make what no one wants, until they crash and burn.

I agree they are full of lies (The LOMO "petzval" isn't even a Petzval design), hyperbole (the part about the Soviets inventing the J-3 Sonnar), and etc. But they are doing what no one else is doing: re-manufacturing retro designs.