50/2 Sonnar T vs Jupiter-8

[Dogman]

Being somewhat addicted to Kievs, I've amassed numerous J-8 lenses and a few Helios-103 lenses as well. While those without a lot of scratches and/or cleaning marks perform well at f/4 and smaller, none of them are very sharp wide open. Since I often find myself needing to shoot at wider apertures, I am wondering if anyone is using the Zeiss Contax 50/2 Sonnar T on their Kievs and, if so, how it stacks up at wider apertures against the normal lenses supplied with the cameras.

 

[varjag]

My experience was similar to yours: I tried maybe 3 J8s (two of them 8M) on Kievs and all of them were fairly poor performers.

Later I got a Sonnar T in industrial TV camera mount, with intention to convert it into LTM. For that, got a donor J8 with cleaning marks on front element, but gave the Jupiter a try first out of curiosity. Well, it turned out to be excellent performer, much much better than any of Kiev J8s I had!

 

[nzeeman]

i tried sonnar, helios and j8 and all of them performed equaly. none of those lens are really sharp at 2 and 2.8 but it is sonnar style. someone like it someone dont - i like it. if you want sharp lens you should look at some other designs i think. probably some modern lens but i dont have any of them so i cant recommend any.

 

[varjag]

Jupiter 8 can be reasonably sharp and high contrast wide open. If you have one that gives this washed-out muddy look, it's a bad example, and apparently there are lots of them around.

 

[zhang xk]

I have some 3K Zorki 50/2 in Kiev mount. They are said to have Zeiss elements. They are not sharper than my J-8, J-8Ms at smaller stops. I did not shoot wide open though. It seems these 3K has a softer front lens element that often has many tiny scratches, so some are less contrasty than J-8Ms.