Dez
Bodger Extraordinaire
Something I have always wondered, but not enough to actually put any work into finding out..................
Why are the Leitz Elmar 3.5 focusing scales so obviously backwards? All the other lenses used a fixed index and moving scale, but the Elmar (and presumably the Hektor 50, I don't recall) went the inconvenient other way round. And they kept doing it for thirty years, until the last year or so of production when the design was finaly sorted out in the rarish red dial Elmar, which was then promptly dropped in favour of the 2.8 version, which is mechanically quite different.
Did Prof Barnack just happen to do it that way, and nobody was impertinent enough to point out the error???
Why are the Leitz Elmar 3.5 focusing scales so obviously backwards? All the other lenses used a fixed index and moving scale, but the Elmar (and presumably the Hektor 50, I don't recall) went the inconvenient other way round. And they kept doing it for thirty years, until the last year or so of production when the design was finaly sorted out in the rarish red dial Elmar, which was then promptly dropped in favour of the 2.8 version, which is mechanically quite different.
Did Prof Barnack just happen to do it that way, and nobody was impertinent enough to point out the error???