Hasselblad lens adaptor for Contax bodies

[rico1]

Gianluca,

For some reason, many Hassy lenses are poorly regarded, especially the 80/2.8 standard. Despite the Zeiss origin, the designs must be old. I haven't owned the 80/2.8 for a long time, but here is an interesting test page showing coma and general lack of focus:

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~QI3Y-YSD/c3.htm

BTW, this Japanese fellow is a C/Y fanatic: Do you know anyone with the 200/2 Aposonner AND the 300/2.8 Tele-Apotessar? Holy Mackerel! He has a nice gallery, too.

I should add, the adapter makes sense in combination with the latest Zeiss offerings for Hasselblad, namely the Superachromat lenses. The MTF shows awesome performance and, of course, a killer image circle for C/Y users. The best thing is the (relative) affordability versus the C/Y APO glass. What was Contax smoking when they priced the 300/2.8???

 

[jakob_groes_ii]

Rico writes: 'many Hassy lenses are poorly regarded, especially the 80/2.8 standard. Despite the Zeiss origin, the designs must be old.'

Id you see the verdict of the 55/1.2 - only grade 5 out of 10, the lowest of them all. Strange.

Regards, Jakob

 

[junken]

My opinion is that the combination Contax body and Hasselblad lenses is interesting if you allready own the systems. Even though I have very good experiences of Hassy lenses on my RTS III body, I don´t think I would choose to buy these lenses instead of normal CZ/Contax lenses if I did not have the Hasselblad body. It is much more convenient to use Contax lenses, they are not so bulky and faster to work with, and image quality is mostly as good. There are some exeptions and that is first the superachromat, but also the 110/2.8 FE which is outstanding. If you own an older Contax with slower X-sync there is a point in being able to use the shutter in the C and CF lenses and sync at 1/500.
Last a reflection about the "poor " MTF values of some of the Hasselblad lenses. This I think they share with most medium format and large format lenses, if compared with the best 35 mm lenses. These simply have to be sharper to perform well with the small film format. But still, if you compare the results the medium- and large format appear sharper, I´ve yet not seen anything comparably to a well exposed dia on a fine grained film shot with a Hasselblad.

 

[chenly]

Any medium-format lens, and the Zeiss offerings in particular (Hasselblad, Rollei, plus the superb Biogon 38mm for Arca-Swiss) will pretty much stomp any 35mm-format lens when used on 35mm film/digital chip. This is because only the center of the lens, the so-called "sweet spot," is used to cover the 24mmx36mm film frame standard to 35mm photography. Every lens performs better in the middle of the image circle than on the perfifery; thus, a lens designed to cover the 54mmx54mm area of a 6x6 camera (Hasselblad, Rollei, etc...) will not get near its coverage circle's limits when using the smaller 24mmx36mm 35mm film frame.

 

[Colin645]

If only it were that straightforward.
Whilst it is known that the "centre" of a lens performs better, Med.Format lenses do not produce the same lines pmm as 35mm lenses. 35mm lenses provide an incredible resolution due to the higher lpmm, but the detail will break up with excessive enlargement.As will any lens of course. A Zeiss or Leica lens will produce sharper and superior results compared to a MF lens(incl.Zeiss)adapted to a 35mm camera.
Colin

 

[wubke]

Mr Tudor and Mr Ljungqwist

Your advices are straight in the direction i would go.
Before yor kind posting i made up the opinion that the 250 superachromat would be the way to go.
The Hasselblad site states that this lens is intended for very big enlargement. And so i hope the lack of lines per mm would be overcomed. I say this because i'm offered a like new one for roughly half the prices.
My choice to committing in this "strange" combination is also due to a future switch towards medium format. And i don't mean to run any comparative test between lens intended for different formats. I believe it would be unfair and useless.
Zeiss lenses for small format have nothing to complain about quality we all know!

Best regards.

 

[chenly]

I own the TeleSuperAchromat 250 and use the Super 350 on occasion. Forget about whatever specficiations you might have seen; these two lenses are the best I've ever seen at their respective focal lengths, and the images from the Super 300 are much better still. You absolutely can't miss with the Super 250. The only hitch is that, because it is color corrected down into the infrared sprectrum, negating the need to refocus when using infrared film, it has a Zeiss single-layer lens coating; the fabled T* coating would absorb the infrared wavelengths. Again, I cannot recommend the Super 250 strongly enough.

 

[chenly]

Colin Elliot:

Check the Zeiss Contax 35mm MFT charts, then compare them to the Zeiss Contax 645, Zeiss Hasselblad, and Zeiss Rollei MTF charts, paying particular attention to the distance from center (i.e., crop out information on the medium format lenses past 25mm).

Additionally, there is no standard for MTF charting in the photographic industry. Zeiss leads the way by taking s&les from the production line; many other manufacturers (can you HEAR me, Canon EF series?) publish only their CAD readouts without accounting for the less-than-perfect manufacturing process.

Lastly, lines per millimeter is not the best way to describe the apparent sharpness of an image; acutance, that is to say, edge sharpness, corresponds very will with viewer's impression of sharpness, and is something to which the Zeiss engineers pay particular attention. As with other esoteric pursuits (e.g., loudspeakers, musical instruments, yada, yada, yada), numbers can be made to say anything; the proof of the pudding, in this case, is in the viewing. I'll take my Hassy 503CW/Super 250 chromes up against anything in the world (the ones I don't screw up, anyway).

 

[chenly]

<H3>Formatting Error</H3>The formatting code mail requires 2 argument(s); you provided only 1 argument(s).

 

[chenly]

WTF? Here's the charts AGAIN, in a separate messag below. Be sure to note the distance in mm from the center; these charts (f/5.6 on the left and f/8 on the right) go from 0-~40mm, while the 35mm charts will go from 0-~25mm.