Voigtländer 50/2 Collapsible Heliar - Part 3

I doubt that anyone expected the new Voigtländer 50/2 collapsible Heliar to be the same optical quality of its 50/3.5 sibling. When you design a faster lens, the optical problems encountered increase geometrically rather than linearly. And how reasonable is it to expect them to match the 50/3.5 Heliar when the latter as been touted as one of the best lenses ever tested? With that clearly in mind, how does the new Heliar fare?

Last week, I took a few test shots using Ilford FP4+. My initial impression was that the lens seemed a bit soft wide open, and that the bokeh was pleasant and not distracting. To me, it looked a bit like a Zeiss or Jupiter lens from the 1950’s wide open, not unpleasant, but not the best candidate for shooting wide open unless you want a soft, flattering image of a face. This week, I tried the slowest film I have right now, Rollei 25. This is the same film I used for my earlier test of the 50//3.5 Heliar, and I found a similar subject, i.e., a train sitting on the track in City Park.

Using a monopod for stability, I shot wide open but didn’t record the shutter speed (in these days of heightened suspicion, taking a photograph of a train is grounds for being beaten silly by anybody badged and officious). Wide open, there is some noticeable vignetting apparently, particularly at the lower right edge. An enlarged central area of detail shows softness. The numbers on the side of the car are obvious, but the same numbers on the front of the car are illegible.

Closed down to f/4.5, vignetting is negligible at the right edge. An enlarged area from the center of the image shows increased contrast and sharpness. The hitherto illegible numbers on the front of the car are now clearly readable (double-click on the image to see a larger version of the print).

While these initial images have convinced me that this is a lens best used stopped down a few stops, none of the images so far give me a good feel for the signature of this lens. I need to start burning some Agfa APX 400 soon. Inasmuch as the Bessa R3M that came with the Heliar has finder lines for 40mm, my 40/1.5 Nokton SC will take the place of my 50/2 Heliar, the latter going onto the front of a Zeiss-Ikon body. A half dozen rolls should give me a better impression of the fingerprint of this new Heliar.

Voigtländer 50/2 Collapsible Heliar - Part 2

My colleagues rib me about having too many 50mm lenses. Thirty years ago, I would have been among them doing the ribbing. I shot with a 35/2 Nikkor almost exclusively for decades. But with my almost exclusive reliance on rangefinder cameras, 50mm has been my staple. Why? Because there are so many variations of 50mm lenses.

To draw an analogy, Mahler’s 5^th symphony has been recorded at least 100 different times, and all 100 performances are a bit different, but they are, for the most part, positive contributions to a Mahler aficionado. Some are reserved, some are over the top, but I like listening to them all as I like their nuances. There are also 100 different recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, but some are done right and some are done wrong. It seems that there is only one right way to do the Nutcracker Suite, so there’s no reason to have more than one recording as long as it’s one of the right ones. There are many different ways to design 50mm lenses, the results vary, and are all can be important contributions to the genre depending on the situation. I don’t feel the same way about other focal lengths. My 35/2.8 Summaron will probably always be my best 35, but its results are hard to distinguish from those of my 35/2 Hexanon, my 35/2 Summicron, and my 35/2 Zeiss Biogon. Truth be told, I feel the same way about my 50/2 Summicron, 50/2 Hexanon, and 50/2 Planar. If I grabbed any of these, sight unseen, and shot with it for a day, I would not know that it was what it was based on the results. They all appear to have been engineered with the same end result in mind.

My other 50’s are different, in large part because there are so many different 50’s out there. I don’t have a 50/1 Noctilux (considered the Grand Marshall of all 50’s), but I do have a 50/1.2 Hexanon, a 50/1.2 Canon, and a 50/1.2 Nikkor. They all produce different results. My 50/1.5 Nokton is nothing like my 50/1.5 Summarit or my 50/1.4 Nikkor, and so on. With all the variations, there are different niches. Where does the 50/2 collapsible Heliar fit? Not where I expected it to fit.

My 50/3.5 Heliar is the lens I will be buried with, attached to a Leica MP. It fits what I want in a 50mm lens as long as I have enough available light to use it. When Cosina announced the 50/2 collapsible Heliar last year, I couldn’t possibly not have one, but I did not expect it to be anything like the 50/3.5 Heliar. Even the early talk about this lens gave reason for skepticism. The 50/2 formula would have to be radically different and would be a challenge given the increased speed. There was some question as to whether Cosina’s engineers could pull it off satisfactorily. What they did produce was one of the best built rangefinder lenses to come out of their factory. This was no surprise. Every successive lens and body that has come out of the Cosina factory bested all of its predecessors in build quality. The new 50/2 Heliar is not quite up to Leica standards, but it is a far cry from the 50/1.5 Nokton and 35/1.5 Skopars of several years ago. I don’t expect Cosina to ever match Leica in build quality. They aren’t trying to do so. They are trying to stay in the black while providing rangefinder aficionados with superior quality optics at a mid-range price.
So where does this lens fit optically? The immediate impulse is to compare it with a 50/2 collapsible Summicron or a 50/2.8 collapsible Elmar. I didn’t find it to be similar to either. Wide open, its initial performance seems surprisingly good. I shot my first test roll on FP4+ under horrific lighting (fluorescent lighting that was about as harsh as a state building can make it). It is a bit soft, but the contrast is very good. Outdoors, in shade and at f/4, it still seems a bit soft with nice, even contrast. In both situations, the bokeh is (in my opinion) better than average for a modern lens (N.B., I think the biggest liability among computer-designed, aspherical element lenses is the degradation of bokeh). In both indoor and outdoor tests with just one roll of film, I get the impression that the 50/2 Heliar is a good people lens, and a good street photography lens.

Now, which niche does it fill? Surprisingly, it seems to fill one that I have been trying to fill for the past two years. I’ve been trying to get a good specimen of a Russian-made Zeiss Sonnar lens (the 50/2 Jupiter 8). I have bought four of them, and all four had some sort of problem (the Russian lenses have abysmal quality control, with lens threads not matching camera threads, bubbles in the glass, etc.). I got tired of playing Russian roulette, buying numerous Russian lenses from Moscow on eBay in hopes of getting that occasional good one. I finally bought a true Zeiss 50/1.5 Sonnar in LTM mount and sent it off to be cleaned and polished. Six months later, it has yet to be returned, the problem being badly corroded metal lens barrel components that won’t release the lens elements for polishing. The 50/2 Heliar looks like what I wanted in an early Zeiss or Jupiter normal lens…lower but even contrast and a slight touch of softness to produce flattering people pictures. A bonus is the excellent build quality that I would not have gotten in a circa 40’s Zeiss or post-war Jupiter.

I still plan to shoot some Rollei 25 film with a tripod to really test the resolving capacity of this lens. But that isn’t so vital to me. If I want resolving power that equals my film, I’ll take the 50/3.5 Heliar or 50/2 Summicron. But for black and white street photography at f/5.6 using TRI-X and 777, I’ll likely take the 50/2 Heliar.

Voigtländer 50/2 Collapsible Heliar - Part 1

This has been, for me, my most highly anticipated lens. This is due in no small part to the fact that I ordered it knowing virtually nothing about it. From an earlier post, one can see that I'm very big on the Voigtländer 50/3.5 Heliar lens. The only two downsides to that lens were (1) that f/3.5 is very slow, and (2) that, in the collapsible LTM design, it felt far less substantial in build quality than collapsible Leica lenses. These concerns were tempered by the resulting lightness of the lens (due to the small lens elements and light build quality).

After a long wait, my 50/2 Heliar arrived today, attached to a Bessa-R3M 250 Jahre body. To digress a moment, the packaging of the kit was very nice, with the camera and the bayonet mount lens hood in a presentation-style box complete with crimson satin. This package would make a very nice gift for a fledgling street photographer. And with bayonet-mount hoods costing ludicrous amounts these days, it was nice to have this included as part of the kit.

Photographs of the 50/2 Heliar and Bessa-R3M can be seen on Stephen Gandy's Cameraquest Web site (Stephen Gandy is one of the few distributors for Voigtländer cameras and lenses in the United States). What the photos cannot tell you is the build quality of the lens. Voigtländer lenses have steadily improved in build quality over the past 5 years. The build quality of this lens is on a par with the recent Zeiss lenses. My immediate impression of the lens was that the diameter and general appearance are similar to a 50/2 collapsible Summicron. The diameter seems larger than the current 50/2.8 collapsible Elmar lens, but it is actually a few mm smaller (at the base). The end of the Elmar is narrower in diameter. The collapsible tube of the 50/2 Heliar, while not quite the precision periscope-like feel of the Elmar, is more stable than the earlier 50/3.5 collapsible Heliar. While the length of the lens full extended (with lens hood in place) is 56mm, the collapsed length is 46.5, a difference of only about 1 cm. Removing the lens hood gives you a more compact 30mm length. The focusing ring at the base of the lens rotates smoothly throughout its range. The aperture ring is knurled from 10:30 to 1:30, but is smooth where the apertures are printed. Unlike the earlier 50/3.5 Heliar, the lens hood does not rotate with the aperture ring. F-stops are at 1/2 stop clicks for all but the f/11-f/16 stop.
While Frances Schultz has complained about the design of lens caps on recent Voigtländer lenses, I like them. The cap fits on the end of the lens without projecting outside of the filter ring. This allows one to cap the lens and then attach the lens hood. Removing the cap with the lens hood in place requires only one finger and a little manual dexterity. Getting the cap back on the lens with the hood in place is more challenging, but I prefer going out with the cap and hood in place. Once shooting commences, the cap goes in my pocket until the end of the day.
No test pictures yet. It is starting to rain as it always does around noon in the New Orleans summer months. I hope to shoot a roll of FP4+ some time tomorrow.