Other/Uncategorized Leica II copy..anyone have one?

[wolves3012]

I believe that the FED 3.5 is a copy of the pre-war elmar, as few were sold with a bloomed lens element. I found results extremely variable, from ok to really sad.

You're misinformed, I'm afraid. The Elmar places the iris behind the first element and is an uncoated lens. Only early FEDs were uncoated and the iris is behind the second element. Externally the style is pretty much the same and they are both Tessar designs but I don't think it's fair to say it's a copy. I'd think production was somewhere between a quarter and half million coated ones, so I don't think you could call that "few" either.

I have two of these (uncoated) and would not call the performance "sad" but rather good for such an old design. Remember that early uncoated ones were generally matched to the body in terms of lens-to-film distance so they cannot be expected to work well on a mis-matched body. The coated ones and similar Industar 22 and 50 are even better, being both coated and of "standard" L-t-F registration (in theory, anyway).