Canon 50mm F1.2, early, in LTM

Great lens, just wish the focus throw was a little shorter. An inner element gets a little hazy ever couple of years so I have to open it up and clean it. Fortunately that is easy to do.

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Wide open
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Stopped down
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Shawn
 
My 50mm f1.2 is very quirky in the sense that its results are almost entirely dependent upon the lighting. As I suppose might be expected especially given that mine has some pretty bad front element scratches (but it was cheap so what the heck). I have disassembled mine and cleaned the haze from it. In fact I am told this is something which needs to be be done fairly regularly. Fortunately this is one of THE simplest lenses to disassemble and clean - it is almost as if the makers knew something 🙂 .

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGp0zR28-rw

Instructions: https://johanniels.com/canon-rf-50mm-1-2-cleaning-leica/

There is one other issue I had with my lens which allowed it to be used on a mirrorless camera but not on a Leica rangefinder. Put simply the internal shim was slightly too fat resulting in quite radical front focusing. The shim is made of brass and looks absolutely original. If so, how it made its way through Canon's QA process when it was manufactured is a mystery. Perhaps, given that the lens I have looks very well used (in fact a little rough) it is more likely that someone, somehow swapped out the original shim for a slightly fatter one at some point in its life. Why? That's a mystery too. Maybe an absent minded technician working on multiple lenses put the wrong shim from another lens in after CLA'ing the lens at some point. Who knows?
In any event I had my lens technician adjust it through a trial and error process of rubbing the "face" of the shim on emery paper then reassembling the lens and testing it for correct focus. Eventually this time consuming process got the focus calibration dead on for my M8.

Having said that when the lighting is right (and especially with no back lighting it performs nicely - classic rendering and low contrast with a pleasant almost pastel color rendering. I think this is a lens which definitely works best indoors.

Samples:

Market Cafe Brunch by Life in Shadows, on Flickr

Those Eyes - Color by Life in Shadows, on Flickr

Those Eyes by Life in Shadows, on Flickr

With contrast boosted substantially in post.

Modern Samurai in Training by Life in Shadows, on Flickr
 
Brian,

Converting the Dream Lens is basically drilling and tapping 5 holes and potentially machining down a guard somewhat. Looks relatively easy though I haven't been brave enough to do it yet. I emailed with SKGrimes and they would convert it for a few hundred.

Shawn
 
Sonnar Brian said:
Did you flood-clean the aperture blades and mechanism when you cleaned the lens? I've never seen lenses haze over like some of these Canon lenses. My current 50/1.2 and 50/1.8 have been free of haze for over a year since I bought them, and the 50/1.4 has been haze-free in the couple of years that I've owned it. The Canon 100/3.5: two of three hazed over within a year. I have it down to 10 minutes to clean them.
Click to expand...

I have put it apart completely, flood-cleaned the blades and the whole mechanism including focus threads, glass-Elements with naphtha and alcohol.
After the haze didn’t go away (it was really bad) I decided to try polishing it manually and very gentle with cerium oxide. This took quite a while but cleaned off the haze completely.
It’s still coming back, but never that bad that I needed to polish it again so far.

The prior owner didn’t take care of it very good, it seems that it was serviced badly as there was obviously missing a shim inside the focus mechanism, leading to focus far behind infinity. A selfmade paper-shim helped, after a lot of experiments on a very far building, with the help of a proper lens spanner and a sturdy tripod...
 
In close the 1.2 can also do a fair approximation of the Dream Lens bokeh.

At 1.4
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Dream Lens

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1.2 was on a VM close focus adapter on a Sony which is why I was able to get in closer.

Shawn
 
Mackinaw said:
I have both lenses, the 50/1.2 and 50/1.4. The 50/1.4 is a much better lens, but the 50/1.2 has much more character. Here's one taken with the 50/1.2 years back. Probably at F1.4. Forgot the film. On my Leica MP.

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Jim B.
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I agree with this. I do not use the 50mm f1.4 as much as I should as its images look too "modern" compared with the 50mm f1.2. It is definitely a better lens though by any measure other than this. (Which is to say in my case is a matter of pure quirky preference).
 
Musashi1205 said:
I have put it apart completely, flood-cleaned the blades and the whole mechanism including focus threads, glass-Elements with naphtha and alcohol.
After the haze didn’t go away (it was really bad) I decided to try polishing it manually and very gentle with cerium oxide. This took quite a while but cleaned off the haze completely.
It’s still coming back, but never that bad that I needed to polish it again so far.

The prior owner didn’t take care of it very good, it seems that it was serviced badly as there was obviously missing a shim inside the focus mechanism, leading to focus far behind infinity. A selfmade paper-shim helped, after a lot of experiments on a very far building, with the help of a proper lens spanner and a sturdy tripod...
Click to expand...

Thankyou for this information: it's really confusing- some lenses seem to stay clean, others have haze coming back on a continuing basis. The one I picked up had not been used for a while, and is clean of haze. I'll keep an eye on it and update this thread if I need to clean it.

Canon 50/1.2, with home-made hood by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr

Canon 50/1.2, with home-made hood by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr

My $10 clamp-on hood. Clamp from an Olympus zoom lens with a 58mm Chinese vented hood epoxied to it. This fits around the original Canon filter. The original hoods are past $100 on Ebay. Original cap came with the lens and camera.
 
peterm1 said:
There is one other issue I had with my lens which allowed it to be used on a mirrorless camera but not on a Leica rangefinder. Put simply the internal shim was slightly too fat resulting in quite radical front focusing. The shim is made of brass and looks absolutely original. If so, how it made its way through Canon's QA process when it was manufactured is a mystery. Perhaps, given that the lens I have looks very well used (in fact a little rough) it is more likely that someone, somehow swapped out the original shim for a slightly fatter one at some point in its life. Why? That's a mystery too. Maybe an absent minded technician working on multiple lenses put the wrong shim from another lens in after CLA'ing the lens at some point. Who knows?
In any event I had my lens technician adjust it through a trial and error process of rubbing the "face" of the shim on emery paper then reassembling the lens and testing it for correct focus. Eventually this time consuming process got the focus calibration dead on for my M8.
Click to expand...

The one I picked up last year was spot-on for my M9, wide-open at F1.2. If I wanted to optimize it for F2, I would need to thicken the shim. If I wanted to optimize it for an Orange filter, I would also have to thicken the shim. Hard to know if someone wanted the lens optimized for a different F-Stop, or some other reason. It could also be this one was the donor. 15 years ago I picked up two incomplete Canon 50/1.2's for $90, made one working one out of the two. I sold it after getting the 50/1.1 Nokton. The one I have now: it is a real keeper, and made the year I was born.
 
Sonnar Brian said:
I sold it after getting the 50/1.1 Nokton.
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Very interesting! Maybe you can start a thread about this lens too! Recently this lens was discontinued. Would be interesting how you - and other members of the forum - think about this lens, what are your and their experiences etc.

The performance of Nokton 50mm f/1.1 is in my opinion exactly the opposite of the Canon 50mm f/1.2. The Nokton has a very even plain of very sharp focus, high contrast and no distortion.

Erik.
 
Sonnar Brian said:
The one I picked up last year was spot-on for my M9, wide-open at F1.2. If I wanted to optimize it for F2, I would need to thicken the shim. If I wanted to optimize it for an Orange filter, I would also have to thicken the shim. Hard to know if someone wanted the lens optimized for a different F-Stop, or some other reason. It could also be this one was the donor. 15 years ago I picked up two incomplete Canon 50/1.2's for $90, made one working one out of the two. I sold it after getting the 50/1.1 Nokton. The one I have now: it is a real keeper, and made the year I was born.
Click to expand...

Good thoughts thank you for that. Not that I necessarily dwell on it but when I do think about why and how, I have been befuddled as to how it might have come about. I had not considered the thought that the one I have could have been a donor lens sold after its correct shim was swapped out to another lens. I think that could be a sound explanation. The thought that someone could have wanted to optimize my lens for another f stop by using a thicker shim probably does not work as the shim which is there caused quite radical front focusing that I could never correct at any f stop till I had it altered. My technician said that his estimate of the amount of metal he had to remove by lapping the shim was perhaps up to one third of a mm. In optical terms that is a huge amount.
 
Erik van Straten said:
Very interesting! Maybe you can start a thread about this lens too! Recently this lens was discontinued. Would be interesting how you - and other members of the forum - think about this lens, what are your and their experiences etc.

The performance of Nokton 50mm f/1.1 is in my opinion exactly the opposite of the Canon 50mm f/1.2. The Nokton has a very even plain of very sharp focus, high contrast and no distortion.

Erik.
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I like this lens and fail to see why so many people disparage it. It is sharp wide open, beautifully made and despite its reputation, has quite acceptable bokeh in many situations. Though granted, in some situations with certain backgrounds its bokeh can be "busy".
I think the problem might be that too many people compared it with a Leica Noctilux (an unfair comparison given that lens cost 10x more) and this was reinforced when Kai Wong from DigitalRevTV channel on Youtube reviewed it also making that comparison and was quite disparaging as a result. (For no particularly sensible or objective reason, which for anyone who followed Kai will readily understand was his signature trademark in reviews - he sometimes said really dumb things more or less for comedic effect.)
 
I've seen some tests in which the Nokton f/1.1 was compared with the Noctilux 50mm f/1. These showed that at full aperture the Nokton was much, much sharper. It was then claimed that the Noctilux 50mm f/1 was not so much a lens for getting sharp images, but for something else. I don't know what, but these tests also showed that the Noctilux 50 mm f/1 gave virtually no coverage in the corners. The corners are black at full aperture. The Nokton, on the other hand, draws beautifully at full aperture. Personally I think the Nokton 50 mm f/1.1 is a fantastic lens, especially for portraits.

The optical construction of the Nokton 50 mm f/1.1 resembles that of the Xenon, Summarit and the first type of the Summilux 50mm lenses.


gelatine silver print (nokton 50mm f1.1 full aperture) leica m3

Erik.

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brusby said:
I agree the Nokton 50mm f1.1 is a very nice and underrated lens.
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Yes!

I do not have the new Nokton 50mm f/1.2, but I would like to see a comparison test between that lens and the Nokton 50mm f/1.1.


gelatine silver print (nokton 50mm f1.1 full aperture) leica m5

Erik.

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gelatine silver print (nokton 50mm f/1.1 @ full aperture) leica m5


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Incredible sharpness @ f/1.1 (you can count the bricks), only the extreme corners are blurred. No distortion either.

Erik.
 
Thank you for these infos Brian .
I've had a couple of Canon 1.2 LTM lenses thru the years which I had to adjust for RF focusing on Leicas by changing the internal spacer.
Then I found a black Canon 1.2 LTM V1 together with a Canon VT Deluxe. Not sure of the year of manufacture of the lens itself , the sn is 22911.
Only had to shim a LTM/M adapter to have the lens RF focus correctly on a Leica M.

Shots taken on a M10 at about f1.8 IIRC:


Aux Tuileries by JM__, on Flickr


Aux Tuileries by JM__, on Flickr



Aux Tuileries by JM__, on Flickr


Best, JM.
 
These are on film, with the Canon 50/1.2 fabricated from two parts lenses.

Bokeh shot:



My current lens has higher contrast. The one used for these pictures had some haze/discoloring on the rear doublet.

Nikki decided to make a surprise picture for me.



No Peeking til it was done.






Night shots required fairly long shutter speed.





All wide-open. The rear doublet had some haze and discoloring of the balsam due to oil seeping into it. Still very usable. I would call this one "average" for a 50/1.2.

The same lens on the M8.



Consider this next shot on the M8 "Worst possible case" for a Canon with a Hazy rear Doublet.



Usable. The M8 pictures are in-camera JPEG. At higher ISO, the in-camera JPEGS are better than what you get from DNG-8. The JPEG engine has the 14-bit pixels to work with. M8 compressed DNG is horrible for high-ISO.
 
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