sharp, sharper, the sharpest...

[Roger Vadim]

Hi Forum members,

well it seems that i am hanging around this forum too often (because of a couple of fixed RF and the obligate number of FSU gear, with my beloved Kiev 4 upfront), so I started to wonder how (if) superiour the latest summicrons are to, say my Nikon 1.8 AIS.
Maybe its this stupid search for the holy grail, or just GAS, but i wondered why/ if there are any competitors (camerasystem aside) which can cope with these faboulous leica lenses in terms of rendering and sharpness. or is this part of the myth machine?
Mhm , maybe i should put the question a bit different: what is the ultimate 50mm lens, and how much is the difference to other lenses?😉
I was wondering what makes this leica thing so special? And why doesn't the competitors deliver the same qualiity - or do they??

Rereading the post makes the question sound a bit stupid, but nevertheless: open for your thoughts.
Michael

 

[FrankS]

Lots of folks here think that Zeiss really delivers the goods. The Leica ASH Summilux 50 is also highly thought of.

For me, it's not all about sharpness. For that, I go with MF. For myself, I can not rationalize spending that amount of $ on an ASH Summilux. Others can and do, and that's fine.

 

[Finder]

Do you just want a bunch of written responses giving personal opinion. Or do you want actual evidence? There are great lenses out there. Zeiss and Haxanon are excellent. The difference is dependant on the media, processing, and whatcha think.

 

[Fabian]

Recently I saw a test of leica and Zeiss lenses on an M8.
It was from a french magazine and a poor scan over at photo.net.

I know that you should not read to much into mtfs and it was almost impossible to read them, due to the poor scan, but one thing could be seen immediately.
Most of those lenses performed equally over all stops. I have studied a lot of grafs on photozone but there was no canon or nikon lens with such good performance wide open.

I think thats the difference between rangefinder and slr lens design.

The only lens that improved from 2 to 2.8 was the biogon 35.

It was a pleasure to look at those good grafs.

Fabian

 

[waileong]

Google

Google

If you google you'll find tons of pages discussing this.

Hi Forum members,

well it seems that i am hanging around this forum too often (because of a couple of fixed RF and the obligate number of FSU gear, with my beloved Kiev 4 upfront), so I started to wonder how (if) superiour the latest summicrons are to, say my Nikon 1.8 AIS.
Maybe its this stupid search for the holy grail, or just GAS, but i wondered why/ if there are any competitors (camerasystem aside) which can cope with these faboulous leica lenses in terms of rendering and sharpness. or is this part of the myth machine?
Mhm , maybe i should put the question a bit different: what is the ultimate 50mm lens, and how much is the difference to other lenses?😉
I was wondering what makes this leica thing so special? And why doesn't the competitors deliver the same qualiity - or do they??

Rereading the post makes the question sound a bit stupid, but nevertheless: open for your thoughts.
Michael

 

[Ronald M]

It is not Leica M vs Leica R. The latest products in each line are very much equal, like the 50 1.4 R and 100 2..8 apo.

There are some old R designs that need updating like the 35 2.0 R. The whole M line is up to current standards.