Early Coated Sonnar on the M8

Sonnar Brian

Sonnar Brian

Product of the Fifties
Staff member
Local time
11:27 AM
Joined
Jan 12, 2004
Messages
19,778
View My Gallery
I've had this lens for a while, picked up off of Ebay because it was an early "T" lens. SN puts it at about 1939. There are earlier Sonnar "T"'s, this one goes to F22. It had some issues, including someone using pliers to try to get it out of its mount. It was frozen in place, and I had to dremel it out. It was unusable, heavy oil on the surface behind the aperture. Tried cleaning it once, some success. I was going to replace the rear with a KMZ module, but "gave it one more shot". The oil/coating came off, left the glass surface in near perfect condition. Put it into a J-3 mount, modified it for close focus.

Here are the results.

Wide-Open at F1.5, 1m "standard" for a J-3 focus mount.


Wide-Open at the new close-focus



Like the song, "Just a little bit closer now".
 
Last edited:
F1.5:



At F4:


This Sonnar is sharp. The lens is much better than it was with the "stuff" on the rear module. I have two wartime Sonnars, and a ZK Sonnar. Compared with the original Zeiss LTM focus mounts, The J-3 focus mount is simplified, easier to work on, and can be modified to focus a little bit closer. A good one is smoother and more reliable than the original Zeiss.

This one is going to be my "user" lens. The wartime lens is optically the same, but the focus mounts are just a bit more fragile. This is a KMZ J-3 mount, and it is really first rate. No Slop, No Play.
 
Last edited:
Just goes to show you that you can use old glass on a digital camera and get very good results. Nice to see too that this lens maintains it's character on digital also. Great job on that lens Brian.

Bob
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom