Oh! I should qualify my earlier comment about pushing tri-x to 1600. Only two of the posted shots are from my recent experiments with that EI (the guy with the goofy grin and the woman wearing what appears to be a duckblind). The guy joking about eating the girl's hamster was on 400TX, the hospital bed was APX100, and the court door was Delta 100.
Dave, I think I would veer toward the Zeiss option. The summilux is probably a better lens, but for my shooting preference, being able to shoot at two focal lengths would be more important than being able to shoot at f/1.4 rather than f/2.
jja, thanks for the compliment. I use an R2A that seems to focus this lens perfectly, but I have not done any scientific tests with a yardstick or graph. My own accuracy at focusing is probably more of a limiting factor than the precision of the lens. 🙂
The size of the lens is reportedly exactly the same size as the 50 summicron, which is to say that it's somewhat bigger than the absolutely dimunitive CV 35 classic, but still far smaller than any 50mm lens in Canon's SLR lineup. At close focus it blocks only a tiny portion of the 50 framelines of my R2A, not enough to be a significant concern.
The focus ring has a 90-degree throw, a small "bump" (not really a tab) that you can choose to use or ignore, and the helical seems to be pretty well-damped. That being said, I grew up on pentax k-mount lenses with extremely fluid operation, and this is close, but not quite as smooth. The aperture ring though is probably the best I've used. Quite obviously made of brass. It is very rapid and smooth, with springy detents and not click-stops.
I am not fond of the plastic lens cap, which is designed to hide under the hood that I don't have. I've seen worse, but it's not as nice as CV's hard metal caps with that wonderful felt lining.
At any rate, there's a depressingly small amount of information about the ZM lenses out on the internets, so I suppose this is my contribution. 🙂
