This is not only unscientific but it’s probably unfair but here goes. I generally shoot two cameras, the Nikon D700 and the Leica M8. I use a mixture of Nikon manual focus and AF lenses for the D700. For the Leica M8, day-to-day, it’s Zeiss’s Cosina-made M lenses. I own a couple of antique (over 50 years-old) Leica lenses (the current Leicas are just too damned expensive), including a 50mm f/2 Summar made in about 1935. How, I wondered, would these compare?
I set up a tripod and shot this scene:
Don’t peek at the metadata. None of these pictures are straight out of the camera. I wanted to see how well I could do with each file and in their raw states none got the color right. And the light was poor. It was quite late in the day and what little light there was came through a large bank of windows on the left of the frame. Exposures were in the 12-second range (the M8 was set at ISO 160 and the D700 at 200). I tried to match the apertures at f/5.6 but the Summar has an old-fashioned scale so I had to approximate with it.
You’ll notice the framing doesn’t quite match from image to image — the D700 is “full-frame” and the M8 sensor has a “crop factor” of about 1.33X. So I had to move back a bit for the shots with the M8.
Now I’ll tell you — the picture above is the M8 with the 50mm f/2 Summar from the 1930s. Here are the other two:
So which is which?
The ancient Summar is first followed by the Nikon 50mm AF 1.8 and then the M8 with the Zeiss 35mm f2. To my eyes they all look just fine. The Summar didn’t do as well as the others in the shadows — it was tougher to separate detail between the desk and the chair. But all of these look good to me.
Now take a look at the crops:
M8 Summar 50mm f/2 @ approx. 5/6
D700 w/50mm AF f/1.8 @ 5.6
M8 w/Zeiss 35mm f/2 @ 5.6
Look closely at the Summar shot and you should be able to see some noise in the shadows under the lip of the desk. I don’t see any of that with the other two. The Summar definitely comes in third there — could it be a result of the faint cleaning marks on the lens combined with the lack of coating? But the interesting thing is that it looks like in both M8 shots more detail holds up. It’s very subtle — in the layers of paint and the wood-grain in the edge of the step — but I think the D700 lags a bit in sharpness compared to the M8, even though the D700 has a two megapixel edge on the M8. I imagine this is a result of Leica’s decision not to use an anti-aliasing filter in the M8 sensor. If so, I hope DSLR makers are looking at Leica’s example. In about two years of shooting with the M8 I’ve taken only one image in which I could spot the moire the AA filters are meant to eliminate.
What about the color? I foolishly did this in a rush and forgot to set the D700 white balance to auto. Instead it was left on a custom setting that was slightly minus-green. I’ve never trusted the M8’s auto white balance so I set it on cloudy (I think — it doesn’t really match any of the numbers in ACR). I had to spend quite a bit of time fiddling in Photoshop to match the colors among the pictures and the actual wall. During this exercise I learned that the D700 colors are much more vibrant and much more easily made even more vibrant compared to the M8 colors.
And there’s ease of use. The M8 is wonderfully simple and it seemed easier to focus it in low light compared with the D700. But the old Summar is awkward in practice. The aperture ring isn’t really a ring, more of a recessed tab. There’s a focus tab that locks on infinity but you can’t really use the tab to focus close — your hand ends up blocking the viewfinder. Ergonomics go to the modern lenses without a doubt. And the Zeiss certainly wins the feel-good award.
In the end I guess this illustrates the trade-offs one faces with these cameras and lenses. Perky colors or more detail? Apparent sharpness or good shadow separation? And price, of course. The antique cost less than the modern Zeiss but more than the 50 AF.
