Anyone have any experiences with the Soviet Jupiter 3?
50/1.5 Sonnar
Is it a crap shoot as they say, you MIGHT get a good copy, and you MIGHT not?
While I'd LOVE to have a new ZM 50/1.5, this is 3 times cheaper.
Opinions?
I don't have any experience with the Jupiter 3, but have spent a long time looking for a ZM 50/1.5 alternative too. In the end, I managed to get my hands on a Canon 50 1.5 ltm for a good price. Maybe one to include in your search too?
It has lovely Sonnar characteristics, optically it's very good. Not as cheap as the Jupiter 3, but should be cheaper than the ZM 50 1.5
I only have one copy of a Jupiter-3, and I think it's a pretty good one, so I can't tell you how much of a crap shoot it is. I think it's a great lens and worth looking for. I will say if you're paying one-third the price of a new ZM 50/1.5 for your Jupiter-3, you're paying too much.
Thanks for the infos.
I have looked at the LTM Canon 50/1.5, it looks nice also.
The price I'm seeing for the Jupiter 3 is actually 1/4th the price of the ZM.
It can be hard to find a good one, especially bargain priced.
I owned two J-3, one J-8 and one J-9 over the last years that were advertised as excellent, with okay pricing.
Each of them had issues, every time the focus was either very stiff or uneven or slipping with unacceptable tolerances, one time the alignment of the aperture was off, one had cleaning marks and on one copy screws were missing.
My copies came from countries where plenty of these lenses can be found. I concluded that in those countries the definition of excellent is more generous than in Germany.
I assume the grease is dry in more copies than not.
I am happy with my actual J-3 copy, but only after I made a CLA myself.
It is not so sharp at F1.5 but quite so at F2.8.
Into the sun, it is susceptible to veiling flare.
Some people would say it has character, and that is actually what I like about it.
I currently have no pictures to share, but on flickr and 500px.com are some good examples.
If you comb through rangefinder forums, it becomes apparent that it also matters where and when the Jupiters were made. According to the lore, the Soviets used genuine Zeiss parts and glass till 1954 or so, after which they had to recalculate the formula. Those earlier J-3's are supposed to be as good as pre-war or war time Sonnars from Jena, and they are coated. They are also not easy to find. The first two digits of the serial are the year of production. The first and the better ones were made in Krasnogorsk even in the 60's. The Kiev/Contax versions have fewer issues than the Zorki/Leica ones, because, presumably, they've used the Contax tooling for the Zorki. The Kiev versions are cheaper, but you'll need an expensive adapter.
Well, now you may not need to comb through those forums.
i have a 1975 m39 version that i use on my NEX. i got it for 1/10th the price of a zm 50/1.5 from adorama who appears to have polished it up nice and relubed the helicoid. i get the sense a lot of the copy variation people talk about comes from poor mechanics rather than poorer optics.
performance wise the lens is horribly prone to flare and not super sharp wide open but pretty sharp centrally stopped down. it never gets sharp enough in the corners for me to consider it a viable general purpose lens, but i feel the same way about the zm 50/1.5 and 50 lux pre-asph. it's a very nice portrait lens – gentle focus roll off, fair bit of glow, and does interesting things to the background (does NOT have smooth bokeh). at some point i'm going to try to do a comparison between it and the m 50 lux pre-asph...
it's possible that the edges and corners might look better on a different camera (NEX-6, m9, or fuji) due to the difficulty my particular NEX-3 & 7 have with oblique light angles.
