rscheffler Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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First off, what I wrote below ended up being quite long. It could of course be much longer diving into even greater nuances, but hopefully it gets my point across and the OP takes the time to read it.
freitz wrote:
Are the ZM's better then the Crons?
Back in 2010 when I got the M9 and was unsure I'd like the rangefinder concept, I started with several ZM lenses - 21/2.8, 35/2.8 and 50/2. I'm still with Leica M and have considerably more lenses, too. My day to day kit now is 21/28/50/90, and they're all Leica lenses.
It's not because the ZMs are bad. In fact, they're excellent, especially for the price, and I still have all of them. It's more a factor of lens rendering characteristics, how I feel about that, and the seemingly minor 'extras' you get by spending 2-3x more for the Leica equivalent. As you're probably well aware with Canon gear, you can spend a lot more on L glass for seemingly incremental performance improvement. It's the same with rangefinder lens choices, though IMO, the variation from worst to best is much tighter, with there being very few rangefinder lenses that are outright bad. The low end might apply to the technical performance of some of the lower cost Voigtlander lenses, but you have to put those into perspective too. You cannot expect a $600 CV35/1.4, which was intentionally designed to mimic 'classic' 1960s optics, to be the technical equivalent of a 35 Lux FLE (though the CV35/1.2 is probably very close). If you spend around $1000 or more, you're going to get quality glass with the difference being in how each lens is optimized for specific parameters.
First of all, the differences in rendering.... Not having shot with the ZE/ZF or vintage C/Y Zeiss glass, I'm not sure how the ZM line compares to those, but typically, Zeiss glass is admired for its boldness and clarity and is great if you like a punchier rendering. It also seems to be pretty uniform in overall rendering throughout the aperture range (though IMO the 35/2 is an exception due to some spherical aberration 'glow' wide open, that pretty much disappears after one stop down). Combined with the narrower dynamic range of the M9 and my feeling was the ZM glass definitely allowed a filmic E6 process look. For certain kinds of subject matter, such as urban scenes, I really liked it. Combined with liberal doses of clarity and contrast in Lightroom and it was really addictive, if perhaps overdone, because for me at the time, I had never experienced that combination of qualities from my Canon images.
Leica's lens rendering, in general, seems not as bold and high contrast as the ZM glass, though is very rich in color quality. Many lenses, especially the faster ones, seem to be dual personality. They have a certain quality when shot wide open and a different quality when stopped down. Usually this is referred to as “Leica glow” as a euphemism for uncorrected spherical aberration. While I have experience with the 28 & 90 APO Summicron lenses, I'm not familiar with the other Crons. But what I see in the modern Summilux lenses I own, and also with the 90 APO, wide open, is a tendency for subtle spherical aberration that takes the edge off very fine details, which slightly mellows the overall rendering, resulting in a pleasing combination of sharpness and lush richness. Stop the lenses down and that SA disappears, resulting in very high detail sharpness. IMO, Leica's subtly refined lens rendering philosophy is not as easy to extract from spec sheet stat comparisons. The tradeoff for this, with some lenses, seems to be fairly complex field curvature, especially in the middle aperture range where depth of field isn't sufficient to mask it. To determine which lenses behave like this, you really need to interpret MTF values, but yesterday's blog post by Roger at Lensrentals does a great job at illustrating the field curvature characteristics of some Leica lenses. Take a look especially at the 35mm lens graphs (unfortunately the 35 Lux is not included): http://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2014/08/some-m-mount-field-curvatures
What are the 'extras' you get for spending 2-3x more on Leica glass? It seems trivial at first. Things like 6-bit coding and focusing tabs. But after a while, sometimes it's the little things that make a big difference. While you can send away your ZM lenses to have the lens flange engraved for 6-bit coding, the most common solution is to use a coding mask and a Sharpie marker, which works, but not perfectly. For example with the ZM21/2.8, I found that if direct sunlight was shining on a certain area of the lens mount, it would be enough to cause the camera's 6-bit reader to not recognize the Sharpie-marker code on the lens, resulting in sequences of images with some coded, some not. And this lens needed to be coded to correct for color shift. I'd end up with images I wanted to keep that were both coded and uncoded, which resulted in more work in post to equalize. Some lenses, more so 35mm and longer, don't really need to be coded, though then you won't get a focal length value in image EXIF. You can set the code value manually in the camera, but if you shoot with more than one lens, you'll inevitably forget to change the code and end up as I did, shooting a 90mm lens set to 21mm, which resulted in overcorrection for vignetting and color shift, and was a hassle to fix in post.
As I got more familiar with the rangefinder system, and started using the 28 Cron a lot more, use of the lens tab on the focusing ring to anticipate and preset focus distance became more intuitive. It's something I definitely relied on with the wedding reception images I posted earlier, to get me in the ballpark, and sometimes amazingly close to bang on, before I even lifted the camera to my eye. Some ZM lenses feature a nub on the focusing ring, which isn't quite the same, though I suppose with time and practice, could be comparable.
You're also paying for Leica's philosophy of smallest possible lens with greatest possible optical performance. In the traditional rangefinder sense, you want a small lens to minimize obstruction of the viewfinder image. But it's easier to make high performance lenses if they can be larger, which tends to be Zeiss’s approach. A stark example is the Zeiss Otus vs. the 50 Lux ASPH or 50 Cron APO. For a purely rangefinder lens example, consider the Voigtlander 35/1.2 and the 35 Lux ASPH. Highly corrected small lenses, with fewer lens elements require use of expensive glass types and techniques, such as aspherical surfaces and floating element groups. Apparently some of these rare glass types have very infrequent production and involve lengthy processing.
Most using this system and commenting here do so for personal work. Therefore, end results, including camera, sensor and lens rendering characteristics, become very subjective aspects of why they use what they use. It’s not about appealing to those ‘consuming’ the images. Most laypeople looking at this kind of thing would not appreciate the subtleties you will in your own work, therefore, you'll need to distill what you learn here and elsewhere down to the factors you think will best suit your needs and wants. My feeling is you could be at the beginning of a new round of equipment purchases as you sort through this yourself.
It's also really easy, because perhaps the combined price of a camera and lens will top $10K, to dwell on technical expectations. There seems to be a near epic expectation that for the price, it must be perfect. That the lens must be beyond technical reproach. That it's the pinnacle of 35mm photography... Forget that. IMO, rangefinder photography is about managing a set of parameters to keep them within a range of 'good enough' to obtain the results you need. If you're shooting at f/5.6 or f/8, you don't need to spend endless time getting perfect rangefinder patch coincidence, because depth of field will cover it. If the scene is distant, you just set the lens to infinity, which is easy to do without even looking, because these lenses have hard, real, infinity stops. It's a matter of knowing when to take the time to be precise, which primarily will be when shooting wide open. The system seems to be at its best, at least for me, when I work intuitively, and trust it to work. If you think about the technical complexity of matching a rangefinder system with the tight lens alignment and calibration required to place the shallow zone of correct focus at the right point on the sensor's surface, it can seem a wonder that the system works at all. But it does so, amazingly well (most of the time ).
Lastly, since it looks like you're going to do this, I would highly recommend you give yourself ample time to use the system, to learn it as well as you can, before concluding whether or not it's going to work for you. You're going to be told that a rangefinder system is very limited compared to DSLRs and that it can't do everything. Obviously, there's something about the do-it-all DSLR system you want to unload that doesn't meet your expectations, therefore you may be better served by a more specialized system. While no system can do everything well, there seems to be an impression that rangefinder systems are slow. They're not. It's the operators who are slow. There is nothing slow about pressing the shutter release and making an exposure. There is no delay because AF decides to hunt for focus. All of those layers of automation between you and the shutter, designed to protect you from screwing up, that create variables in time delay in other systems, are gone. Instead, the onus is on the operator to be ready for the shot. That could mean pre-focusing, using hyperfocal distance, lens tab position to anticipate and be ready, if such spontaneity is required. This can be both very refreshing and very frustrating as you initially stumble without the backups customary in other systems keeping your head above water.
You’re not going to make an epic mistake choosing a ZM lens over a Leica, or a Summicron over a Summilux.
Bottom line, IMO, is to approach it with an open mind, learn the system and its quirks, and just try to have fun with it.
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