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Showing posts from April, 2013

Manual beauties: the Jupiter 9 MC

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First post of this series is about the brilliant Jupiter 9 (85mm F2). The lens has a pretty long history! In fact it is a direct copy of an earlier Zeiss design, which was acquired by the soviets after WWII. At first it was available for Zorki and Kiev rangefinder cameras, but later it was added in M42 mount to the Zenith line. My copy is a multicoated (MC) one, which is pretty commonly available where I live. You can find more pieces of the story here . Let's see the lens! Jupiter 9 front  Jupiter 9 front It is a classic preset lens, which means that aperture must be selected, and then set. The aperture values shown on the picture above can be directly selected, but the aperture is stepless. It is sometimes called as the "bokehmonster" , because it has 15 blades! Jupiter 9 side Minimum focusing distance is 0.8m, which is not suprising knowing that it is basically the evolution of a rangefinder lens.  Made by LZOS My copy was made