Manual beauties: the Jupiter 9 MC
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!
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| Jupiter 9 front |
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| 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!
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| Jupiter 9 side |
Minimum focusing distance is 0.8m, which is not suprising knowing that it is basically the evolution of a rangefinder lens.
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| Made by LZOS |
My copy was made by a company called LZOS.
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| Name marking |
This is a really fine lens made of durable plastic and glass. It is heavy and seems to be able to withstand a nuclear explosion! To tell the truth it feels better made than my late Carl Zeiss Jena optics, which are considered to be the state-of-art lenses from the Eastern Block.
The focal length is considered as the classic portrait on full-frame, and tight portrait on APS-C sensor. I liked it more on my NEX, but I didn't have much time to play with it on full frame. The common criticism about the late version is the added softness at wide open aperture setting, which seems to be a design decision. (Rangefinder versions are said to be slightly sharper at F2.) The first test shots highlight this kind of behaviour and show the out of focus rendering.
All these pictures are right out of the Nex, no other processing applied. As you can see Jupiter 9 and Sony NEX-5N combination produces pleasing colors! Quality of the bokeh is not bad either, and I simply love how it renders the OOF highlights. The characteristics do not change significantly when stopping down thanks to the 15 blades and rounded aperture. And what about the sharpness? Center of the image is sharp enough at F2, but the whole image is wonderfully sharp from F4 on the APS-C sensor. Check the following in bigger size! (Shot at F5.6)
The focal length is considered as the classic portrait on full-frame, and tight portrait on APS-C sensor. I liked it more on my NEX, but I didn't have much time to play with it on full frame. The common criticism about the late version is the added softness at wide open aperture setting, which seems to be a design decision. (Rangefinder versions are said to be slightly sharper at F2.) The first test shots highlight this kind of behaviour and show the out of focus rendering.
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| Walk in the park: Leaves and tree |
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| Walk in the park: The passage |
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| Red pepper |
All these pictures are right out of the Nex, no other processing applied. As you can see Jupiter 9 and Sony NEX-5N combination produces pleasing colors! Quality of the bokeh is not bad either, and I simply love how it renders the OOF highlights. The characteristics do not change significantly when stopping down thanks to the 15 blades and rounded aperture. And what about the sharpness? Center of the image is sharp enough at F2, but the whole image is wonderfully sharp from F4 on the APS-C sensor. Check the following in bigger size! (Shot at F5.6)
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| Walk in the park: Autumn leaves |
That's all for today. I'm going to showcase some more photos next time including a few winter landscape shots. Stay tuned for the update!
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