I'll second that although a quick glance or two or three and I realise it's going to cost me time (looking) and money (buying). I'll say no more but pass on the warning...
Regards, David
The Nikon site is a great use of all of your spare time. Great material in there. Of all the 50/1.5-ish Sonnars/continuances/copies/clones/what have you, this is my thumbnail sketch (since I've used all of them). Hopefully this will help you cut down on any blind alleys.
- Prewar Zeiss (Contax mount only): ahead of its time in contrast (certainly ahead of Gauss-type lenses) but still a bit dreamy by today's standards. Arguably the time that Sonnars ruled the (light) waves. It's only really available for Contax mount, but with an (expensive) adapter you can slap it onto an LTM or M body.
- Opton: still a bit sharper and contrastier in its sharp places than early Leica high-speed 50s. For many uses (particularly outdoors), you won't see a tremendous difference from modern 50s (it's not quite up to modern performance standards, but for a pre-1970 lens, it's great). Same note on availability only Contax mount.
- Jupiter-3 LTM: I've owned many of these over the last 12 years, and it's a lens I both love and hate. If the collimation is good (as Brian Sweeney would attest, it was not originally set up for Leica back-focus - and the error is apparent closer than 2m), it can be a great vintage-style lens. Don't expect pixel-level sharpness from a lens whose test certificates show 1/3 to 1/4 of a modern Gauss-style 50. But do expect pleasant pictures, especially of people. When shopping for these, you will always find some degree of coating marks. But the real issues are corrosion of the barrels, people hacking together lenses from multiple examples, and generally having the hell beaten out of them. These sold from Ukraine for $50 in the early 2000s and were good; recent offers from Ukraine seem to be the dregs sold for the maximum amount of money (the asking prices seem out of sight for something that has a 1/3 chance of being a dog). From an optical performance standpoint, the later black ones didn't seem as good (and this seems for some reason to be the case with the Jupiter-8s as well). And on an aesthetic point, the 1950s coatings are gorgeous.
[On all of the above, consider the availability of 40.5mm contrast filters - good ones are at best special-order items now]
- Nikkor 50/1.4 LTM: probably the best made (the brass mounts are heavy and nicely finished) and highest-performing variant. Very sharp (especially wide open and close-up), very contrasty (at least from f/2 down). Some veiling flare at f/1.4 (not unusual on this type of lens). The 50/2 (based on the 50/2 Sonnar) performs similarly and seemed to me sharper. Both these lenses have chronic oil-on-the-blades issues, and my repair person told me that the best you can do is lube the helicoid with a modern grease and keep it out of the heat (oil on the blades is not the issue; it's fractions of the grease evaporating onto the glass). Bokeh on the 1.4 can be wiry; it's more moderate on the 2.
- Canon 50/1.5 LTM: also nicely made like the Nikkor. Its correction makes it very sharp but degrades bokeh. The chrome on these seems to be peeling off in a lot of examples. Maybe metal finishing was poor in postwar Japan. This has the worst situation with filters, since Canon's 40.0mm thread never set the world on fire, and as I recall, the front element bows very close to the filter ring.
- Zeiss ZM 50/1.5: if you have the cash, this is probably the best performer out of all of them; you get modern optics, modern multicoating, and an intentional respect for bokeh that does not come at the expense of resolution (well, not that much degradation of resolution). With these, the focus can be set to 1.4 or 2.8; my copy seems to center at about f/2. This is really a specialist lens that if you were into 50mm lenses, probably should not be your only 50mm.
The only thing I would caution is that just as Sonnars have certain central characteristics, so do the lenses. Having seen the various implementations, my take is that the key thing at wide apertures is a sharp central section, some focus shift with aperture changes, and varying degrees of veiling flare. But the rest of the characteristics can be surprisingly lens-specific.
Dante
