Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/11/05

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Subject: Re: Does anyone use the 50 R Summicron lens?
From: n5xrd@juno.com (Richard W. Hemingway)
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 1997 14:08:39 CST

Richard,

>Does anyone out there use a 50mm Summicron R lens all that often?  It 
>would
>be the cheapest way to get into a low light lens for the R system.  It 
>just
>seems hard to go back to a 50mm when you can use zooms and other 
>specialty
>lenses but all with a smaller maximum aperture.

With my R8 I have a 35/2.0, 50/2.0 and 90/2.8.  For years I only used the
50/2.0 and then moved to the 35 mostly.  I noticed on the last trip that
I used the 35 and 50   on low light a lot with asa 200 slide film.  On
interiors the 35 was more useful, and outside the 50 worked quite well. 
The 50 is a great lens.  years ago I had an R4 with the 50/2.0.  I had
taken some portraits of my son with the Hasselblad and printed them at 16
x 20 and thought they were great.  Sometime later I used the R4 and
50/2.0 - they blew me away.  At 16 x 20 they were somewhat sharper and
had better detail and color saturation.  Part of this was due to the fact
the I was using Kodachrome in the R4 and Ektachrome in the Hassy.  I
printed almost exclusively from chromes.  It might have been interesting
to use the same film in both cameras.

Later the 120 Kodachrome 64 did not seem to give the same results as the
35mm K64.

The 50 is a very light lens and small (for an R lens).

Dick