Nice use of a Jupiter-3

It's often said that J3's were initially made by KMZ using German glass and experienced German engineers, from the slow production start with few lenses (1948-1950) to the first real production (1951-1955), both for J3's on Contax and Leica thread mounts... It's commonly heard too, that after 1955 they ran out of German glass, and then recalculated the lens for their own glass... Some say those first eight years produced the best J3's, but the one used in the link above is from the 60's and shows wonderful image quality, so it seems superb J3's were made for decades...
Cheers,
Juan
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
It's often said that J3's were initially made by KMZ using German glass and experienced German engineers, from the slow production start with few lenses (1948-1950) to the first real production (1951-1955), both for J3's on Contax and Leica thread mounts... It's commonly heard too, that after 1955 they ran out of German glass, and then recalculated the lens for their own glass... Some say those first eight years produced the best J3's, but the one used in the link above is from the 60's and shows wonderful image quality, so it seems superb J3's were made for decades...
Cheers,
Juan
Click to expand...

Brian Sweeney who used to be on RFF had once concluded that the best years of J3s are from 1951-1955 (KMZ) and after that 1958+ (ZOMZ). He literary worked on hundreds of them (and all other 50mm Sonnar type lenses). The newer Valdai ones he had never matched the older ones often due to bad fixture tolerances.

Strange things happened at the J3 producing plants. You'll find J3 with Zeiss glass but russian fixtures, you can find J3 with Zeiss glass AND Zeiss brass fixtures (basically genuine CZJ Sonnars in russian mounts and with J3 nameplates) and J3 which are completly russian. J3s are so similar to CZJ Sonnars that even single parts/elements are interchangeable between them (as far as I know only the shape of the rear triplet changed slightly beginning with the ZOMZ production).

A correctly adjusted J3 will perform at least equal (sometimes even better) to a good geniune CZJ Sonnar/good Canon Sonnar/good Nikkor Sonnar. There are tons of comparisions out there between those... with the J3s always being in the top positions. The performance between each lens varies slightly, but that's the same with all the other Sonnars too.

And don't complain about the russian aluminium mounts, geniune LTM CZJ Sonnars had those too :rolleyes: They work well enough and make those lenses really lightweight.

I guess one of the causes of the "bad" reputation is that many of those lenses were "repaired" by inexperienced people and/or are frankenlenses built out of many mismatched J3 spare parts people had lying around to make fast money. And often people complaining about the "bad quality"/softness/etc. either had never seen a J3 in RL or were unfortunate to get one of those lenses that were tinkered with :rolleyes:


I also had experience with a "bad" 1958 J3. Mine had a wrongly fitted rear triplet. I don't know if it happened a the production stage or in it's long life after that. But I guess it was the first one, as other parts of the lens were adjusted to compensate for the wrong fitting and it came on a body that was propably adjusted to work with this J3 (and judging by the lots of cleaning marks on the front elements this lens was used a lot)
But even then, when the focus was nailed, the misfitted J3 had good sharpness even wide open. After refitting the group and doing some shimming this lens is now tack sharp wide open (although of quite low contrast, which is easily fixed at the scanning/printing stage) and focuses at every distance correctly enough on a Leica. Stopped down its contrast and resolution is slightly better then that of my coated clean Elmar, it only looses in flatness of field and distortion, but that's to be expected of a Sonnar.
 
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