The Online Photographer

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And although I'm not a camera expert—cameras are adjacent to my interest, not the center of it—I'm well aware that in the early years of Japanese cameramaking, post WWII, the Japanese also, um, "sincerely flattered" the established German cameramakers. Now the Japanese have at least as good a reputation as their onetime role-models. I'm also aware, broadly, and in a few cases particularly, that the Chinese have not, in the most recent past, had the most sterling reputation when it comes to respecting intellectual property. So should we castigate China for imitating?

It's not like we haven't seen imitation in the up-and-coming Chinese lens industry so far. You might know of many more examples than I do, but one is the Yongnuo copy of the Canon EF 35mm ƒ/2:

(Not quite to scale. I tried.)

The copy didn't appear until the original was out of production, and the copy is very inexpensive—$106 as of now. They're actually perfectly friendly little lenses in terms of results, although I might search for a used Canon original in good condition if I were going that direction myself. 

Now a Chinese lensmaker has introduced a copy of a much more famous lens, the Leica 35mm ƒ/2 Summicron version IV, designed by the most famous of Leica lens designers, Walter Mandler, who also designed the other three early M versions. Wikipedia lists six screwmount lenses, 27 M (rangefinder) lenses, and 16 R (SLR) lenses to Walter's credit, including several of my personal favorites. And the new Chinese copy is called a "Mandler"! It seems that's going to be the company name. A bit cheeky, isn't it? Seeming as it does to appropriate not only the design and form of the long-discontinued lens—it was replaced by the first ASPH. (aspherical) version in 1996, which is why the IV is sometimes referred to as the "pre-ASPH."—but its heritage as well. Of course you could call it an "homage" and just not worry about it any further. But where would be the fun in that? Although called a "Summi-Cron" to avoid triggering trademark tangles, the upcoming lens is obviously intended to be a replica—right down to the box. 

The prototype
I'm quite familiar with the original lens. In fact, I'm afraid I'm the guy who dubbed it "the King of Bokeh," a title that has stuck like glue for Lo these 28 years or so. Jim Kelly, who retired as Managing Editor of Model Railroader magazine, once told me that he'd been in the business so long that he was seeing all his old bullshit come circling back around again. In new articles submitted by young writers to the magazine, he would find telltales—phrases, ideas, metaphors, bon mots, strategies, etc.—in which he readily recognized the source as...himself. I tossed off that "King of Bokeh" thing very casually in a picture caption in 1997, and it has clung ferociously to the lens ever since, like a barnacle from hell. Serves me right. Then again, I coined a thousand other quips, and none of them stuck. Who could have known that one would?

For the record, that Leica lens, while very good—I loved it, foibles and all—is the king of nothing, and certainly not of bokeh. I didn't even use it like enthusiasts do today—I shot with it at middle apertures of subjects mostly in the middle distance—say 6–25 feet—and I liked the gentle way it transitioned to slight out-of-focus blur when used that way. That was very pleasing. But today people would crank it wide open and shoot close up to "maximize the bokeh"...which, by the way, shouldn't even be a thing. Who shoots a 35mm lens for the bokeh?!? That makes no sense at all. I can tell you that I only ever shot that lens wide open TWICE in all the years I owned it—and I remember the occasions, because it stunk wide open. Well, no, not "stunk." Like a lot of spherical lenses in those days, it just wasn't all that good at maximum aperture. Despite what you're about to read about tigers and roses.

Not only has the old lens risen to stratospheric levels on the used market, but all sorts of claims are made for it, some of them not very comprehensible to me. I found one connoisseur site that I'll quote a few tidbits from. Before I do, I'll mention that we should cut the writer some slack—not only might the auto-translation not be the best, but Chinese is a language full of idioms, much more even than English, so I'm told, and we should remember that many of our expressions and phrases that seem perfectly plain to us might be puzzling when rendered verbatim into a foreign tongue—say, for example, "dung of the male bovine." But here are a few quotes from that article I found (note that the author calls the 7-element v.IV lens the "Seven Jade" or "Seven Jades"):

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"What color is the sunlight in my mind? What color is the sunlight in the Seven Jades? [...] And I used the F2 aperture, and the Seven Jades were fully opened. The color performance is exactly the color of the sunlight in my mind. I only use F2 because I like that special flavor, imperfect blur, perfect in-focus. The in-focus is as sharp as a tiger, and the out-of-focus is as shy as a rose. The Seven Jades are like a tiger sniffing a rose."

That right there is the best description of image quality I ever read. Utterly delightfully meaningless.

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"The Seven Jade has the best blur between F4 and F8, and it was these apertures that earned it the reputation of the king of bokeh."

Got that right, although I would have said ƒ/5.6 to ƒ/11. But there it is—there's my darn "king of bokeh" thing again, rearing its ridiculous head. You'll seldom find any review of the v.IV 35mm Summicron that doesn't go there.

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"There is a legendary lens called the king of out-of-focus, which is the fourth version of the Leica Seven Jade M35 F2.

"The photos taken by this lens are indeed very special. Many people said that they have a kind of artistic conception after seeing the photos. This artistic conception is not as straightforward as that given by ordinary SLR telephoto lenses, but rather a kind of implicit hesitation. This artistic conception should actually be what everyone calls the king of out-of-focus. 

"What is the king of out-of-focus? It is the gradual blurring of the distance and the 3D sense. If there is no such gradual blurring and the background is directly blurred, it will create a sense of oppression. Compared with other lenses, the Seven Jade has the sense of space of the theater, and the other lenses have the sense of space of the symposium. Of course, many people think that these two feelings are not better than each other, because the latest Leica lenses have become the sense of space of the symposium. But now that the new lenses have become the symposium, the Grand Theater seems special, and as time goes by, the gradual blurring seems a bit artistic."

We'll just be kind and assume all that (and there's more) makes sense in Chinese.

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The replicant 'Seven Jades'
I don't mean to sound, er, jaded. (Sorry!) Although I am jaded, so why not sound that way? It's only honest. 

The Mandler Summi-Cron [sic]

Speaking of honesty, let's admit that I'm not going to instantly become an expert in Chinese off-brand lenses just to write one post. There's a lot I don't know. First of all, is the new Mandler lens the same lens as an earlier 35mm pre-ASPH replica, the Polar Solaron? Dunno. Is the rebranding a licensing, or is the Mandler a completely new attempt by different people altogether? Dunno. Is Mandler the name of the company, or just this one lens? Right—I don't know. We could add more questions here, lining them up to receive the same answer. 

Another suggestion (supposition?) that I saw online was that the Mandler, which is suppose to arrive in a store near you sometime this month, is a craven attempt by the former Polar brand to rename its replica in order to escape reports of poor quality control levied against the Solaron. A case of artful dodging, you might call it. I would guess that that's probably an accusation made in the absence of evidence—but I don't have any evidence of that. And it wouldn't mean it was wrong, either.

Part of the irony of that is that quality control is essentially what made Leica famous in the first place. I knew Arthur Kramer, the longtime lens guru for Modern Photography magazine, who for many years wrote an influential column on optics. Arthur explained that when spherical lenses were made, in those long-ago days before computerized design and manufacturing control, a batch of finished lenses would be tested, and any lenses found to be below a certain spec would be discarded. The all-important question was, what was that specification to be? Makers of cheap lenses set their sights low, and sold most everything they produced. So you might get a good one, you might not. Decades ago, some professionals would buy three copies of a new lens, test them, keep the best one, and return the other two. At the other end, Leica set its standards very high. As Arthur loved to say, that meant Leica threw away a lot of lenses—and that was the reason Leica lenses were so good, because you were assured of getting one with excellent specs. And that was the reason they cost more. The fewer lenses a lensmaker kept from a typical batch, the more each of the remaining ones had to cost. 

And the irony within the irony is that quality control is also the reason I got rid of my own Leica 35mm ƒ/2 Summicron-M version IV, the very lens I dubbed the King of Bokeh all those years ago: poor quality control. On my lens, the black coating on the aperture blades flaked off with use, and deposited a cluster of tiny little chips right in the middle of an inner element. They were hard to see with the naked eye at a foot or 18 inches away, but very visible with a loupe and a good light from up close. I had the lens dismantled and cleaned one time, at what seemed to me then to be considerable expense, but then when I checked it again a number of weeks after the cleaning, there they were—a few more tiny flecks of black deposited inside the lens. I still remember exactly where I was sitting when I realized the problem was still there. My heart fell. I knew I wouldn't be able to live with it. I quietly sold the lens (disclosing everything to the buyer, of course), without writing about it in the pages of any magazine: you can't draw any conclusions about all lenses from one sample, and it's not fair to damn a manufacturer with one anecdotal case. 

Walter Mandler

I still have some pictures I took with that lens, of course. It was a very pretty lens. The pictures were very pretty, is what I mean. The handling was great—I've written whole articles about pre-focusing with that lens—and it was marvelously small. I actually demonstrated pre-focusing to Ralph Gibson at one of the New York shows, with that lens—looking at a target and focusing the lens by feel, with the camera held at my waist—and on that occasion I nailed it perfectly, which was fortunate. (I will admit that Ralph didn't recognize me at the time, even though I had interviewed him in his SoHo studio a few years prior.)

Don't think I wouldn't like that
I don't think it's justified to dismiss or downplay Chinese lens manufacture. Is not China effectively the world's manufactory? I'm quite grateful for many of the things I own that are made in China, starting, I believe, with the keyboard I am typing this on. They don't have the reputation yet of other sources of lenses, but they are collectively learning and improving in leaps and bounds. The category is already so rich that it's its own little corner of the camera and photographing hobby—you could have fun just collecting and trying Chinese lenses. And how can you dislike a category in which the price for playing is generally so low? I'll tell you one thing—f I weren't semi-retired as a lens geek, I'd love to compare the bokeh of the Mandler Leica homage 35mm ƒ/2 to the bokeh of the $106 Yongnuo Canon homage 35mm ƒ/2. Having owned both of the originals, my money's on the Yongnuo for the win. But we'd have to run the actual tests to see. 

So, finally, would I get one of those Mandler copies? The answer is, you bet! Oh, man. Of course I would. Assuming I still shot a Leica M-mount camera as my main axe, that is. Especially if I still shot film. I idolized Walter Mandler once upon a time. And I'm not paying $2,500 for a 30-year-old used lens, sorry. The Mandler is supposed to cost $800 give or take $200, well below the used price of an excellent+ used original, and that makes it accessible. It would be fun to compare it to the real thing, fun to see if it actually replicated all of the old lens's qualities and properties, and fun to explore its image quality in its own right. And I'm just the sort of miscreant iconoclast who would love to have it on my Leica, fooling 99% of the people who looked at it into assuming I was shooting with a Leica lens. I've had a lot of experience in this biz, and I can guess to a very high degree of certainty that a percentage of viewers would expound on the lovely properties of my Leica photographs while looking at my prints. And now I know how I'd respond: I'd nod sagely, stroke my chin, and say, "the in-focus is as sharp as a tiger, and the out-of-focus is as shy as a rose. The Seven Jades are like a tiger sniffing a rose." I'm sure the response would be silence—appreciative, or otherwise.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

Luke: "A fun read, and classic TOP!

"I would expect Chinese languages to have many more idioms than English. Their culture has been around much, much longer. These people, when faced with a government ban on posters with certain political phrases, started showing a blank sheet of paper as a form of protest, and everyone understood. It even has its own emoji: 🗌 ."