Hi Srđan,
nzeeman said:
i was always confused with stellas theory. why would soviet designers leave their lenses adjusted for contaxes. they made leica copies before wwii - i believe they fully copied leicas and they surely used leica standard before wwii. there is no reason to change all that after the war and take new standard for ltm cameras and lenses.
I believe the basic assumption for that hypothesis is that after the war the situation on the domestic Soviet market had changed a lot with the introduction of the Kiev, which followed the Contax standard. According to this hypothesis, the Soviets noticed two things:
(1) It makes no sense to produce lenses for two different camera systems with only a very small difference in focal length, if instead you can decide on one of the two as a standard.
(2) It is no problem to design the FED/Zorki/Drug/... rangefinder in such a way that it can be adapted to various normal focal lengths. According to this hypothesis, that's why most FSU screwmount rangefinders have a wedge-shaped rangefinder cam follower that can be easily adjusted for close focus, and the Drug has an eccentric screw. That would mean that the Contax standard was chosen, because it is easier to adjust a Zorki to the Contax standard than a Kiev to the Leica standard.
All in all this makes a lot of sense. However, I think Kim has an alternative hypothesis that seems to go into the direction that many LTM lenses were nevertheless shipped adjusted to "the Leica standard", whatever that means in practice. It is certainly striking that with Kiev mount lenses there appears to be much less of a problem with close focusing - maybe because these lenses were more consistent because readjustment was unnecessary (but maybe also because there is simply no Western Contax-mount camera alternative except the Nikon and most Nikon nuts are somewhat reluctant to use Soviet lenses, because they are even more elitist than Leica users). It is also striking that it is apparently relatively easy to adjust the normal focal length of the LTM lenses, by moving the front and rear groups relatively to each other (something which I read a lot about especially from Brian Sweeney, but which I've never tried), which suggests that the truth may be somewhere in between. The factory may well have shipped lenses in both configurations at times; after all, with a Zorki it was no problem whatsoever to adjust the close focusing distance of your body if close focus was off. Since a Soviet photographer was unlikely to build up a large collection of different Jupiter-3s and Jupiter-9s, in all probability adjustment wouldn't be necessary too often, and even if it was, if he got a J-3 that was off consistently, it was easily possible to modify the lens so that it fits his particular body. If this alternative hypothesis holds true, it would mean that the market today should be flooded with lots of lenses with minimally different focal lengths, which appears to coincide with what we observe.
Before the war the situation was completely different. Many FED lenses from before the war tend to be incompatible with "the Leica standard" anyway, because lenses were matched to bodies individually, not unlike Leica did it themselves before they introduced interchangeable lenses on a large scale. One should also note that Leica took great care to design their standard in such a way that it would be incompatible with everybody else; the screw thread on the first Leicas was a M39 thread with 26 threads per inch, easily mistaken for a standard M39/1mm thread until you notice that lenses don't work because you have to jam them in and break the screw thread in the process.
Don't interpret too much into the word "the Leica standard". All this means is that the normal focal length of the 50mm lens, around which the rangefinder system is built, is 51.6 mm, as opposed to 52.3 mm (I think) which would be "the Contax standard". This is not so much about Leica as a brand rather than about a single number, which happened to be introduced by Leica in the 1930s, rather than by Zeiss which would have been the alternative.
I wouldn't put too much into Leicaphile's derisive talk about Soviet equipment. People who spend a lot on their equipment tend to build up quite an emotional relationship with it, and Leica is great for attaching myths to the name. In the rangefinder world, up to the 1950s and early 1960s the Soviet production IMHO was perfectly on par with the worldwide standard, and that was when on the rangefinder market they stopped innovating on a large scale anyway (for various reasons). If you want more modern Soviet cameras, you have to look at SLRs. It is also true that, notwithstanding the presence of great scientists, and notwithstanding the existence of some outstanding products, the Soviet industry also produced quite a bit of junk - there was a reason that everybody ditched their Raduga TV sets for imported Japanese ones in the late 1980s, for example. Then again, I've been hanging around quite a lot with professional photographers from the former Soviet Union, and even among them it was a pretty common idea that Leica is the epitome of cameras, while domestic cameras were largely for the amateur market, and many of the more complex domestic models had a reputation of being capricious and unreliable. I've heard that often enough from photographers and former and current camera salesmen that I think that this was pretty much the general attitude in the Soviet Union towards domestic the camera production, at least since the 1980s. All in all, the history how photographic equipment was produced, used and appreciated in the Soviet Union is a fascinating and multi-faceted one; we're certainly not doing it justice if we describe it as a history of junk from a developing country, but we shouldn't overglorify it either because of the Mir, Gagarin and Tereshkova.
Philipp
