And anyone who frequents auctions or estate sales ought to know that "lots" are the crap being shoveled. A box of anything is a box of stuff with no value. You'd have to seriously deceive yourself to think buying bottom dollar goods ought to net you top quality merchandise.
Yet aparently even our esteeemed Mr. Hicks thinks "getting good deals" showed him the cream of the crop. Just goes to show you how we deceive ourselves.
And to temper my comments, I do hold Mr. Hicks in high esteem. I just happen to disagree with him on the whole Ukrainian camera thing. It's not a personal indictment, just a matter of diverging opinions.
I wasn't talking about auctions or estate sales. I was talking about the world of 30+ years ago, when a dealer would get an outfit in, and sell the bits separately, but still all cheap. Cheap, as I say, for a reason. Or for that matter, he might have just the one Russian lens. I'd buy something else -- I did a lot more buying and selling in those days -- and say, "What can you do the Russian lens for?" in the hope I'd get a decent one. Then he'd knock a bit off because I was buying several things at once. That's the sort of 'lot' I meant. 'Deals' would have been a better word than 'lots'.
You can disagree to your heart's content, but it won't make Soviet wide-angles any better. The Zeiss wide-angles of the 1930s were mediocre by the standards of even 20 years later, and Ukrainian quality control didn't make them any better.
Note too that I was not 'slamming' all Soviet lenses: I specifically referred to wide-angles. I have never had a bad 135/4 -- an astonishingly good lens -- and
for its era the 85/2 was good, in my experience comparable with the later, bigger, heavier and more expensive early 90/2 Summicron, but neither was a patch on the second Summicron.
As for the 50m f/2 and f/1.5 lenses, they were Sonnar designs which sacrificed resolution to contrast in the days before lens coating: a 3-group lens has fewer glass-air surfaces to lose contrast. Contemporary (1930s) Leica lenses (the 4-group Summar and 5-group Xenon) exhibited significantly higher resolution and significantly lower contrast. Once coating came in, though, more groups made more sense -- which is why the current C-Sonnar is a 4-group lens. I have heard nothing but good reports of the 50/1.8 but I have never owned one and besides it wasn't a 1930s Zeiss design.
The original 7-glass triplet-derived 35mm Biogon was much superior to its contemporary competitor, the 35/3,5 Elmar, but again, by the standards of even 20 years later, it was pretty indifferent.
A Tessar design is wildly overstretched at 28mm for 35mm coverage, and was significantly inferior to its Leitz competitor, the 5-glass (though still triplet-derived) Hektor, and even the symmetrically derived 1950s Leitz 28mm (a great improvement over the Hektor) is very indifferent by modern standards.
So if either of us is deceiving himself, I don't think it's me. It may not be you either. I fully take your point about price being important, but equally, if something is inferior, it is inferior regardless of price.
You must also bear in mind that when I was buying this stuff in the 1970s, it was 30-40 years newer than it is now and no-one was sentimental or falsely optimistic about Soviet kit: it was cheap entertainment. Of course there were reverse snobs who maintained that their Kiev outfit was every bit as good as the current offerings from Leitz, in palpable defiance of the truth, and of course there were users of Soviet kit who produced brilliant photographs, because if you're good enough, and work within the limitations of your kit, you can make good pictures with almost anything. But you'd never find many people who had the sort of rosy optimism that seems increasingly common today.
Cheers,
Roger
