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Expensive Rangefinder vs Affordable SLR - 40mm Leica Lens vs 45mm Carl Zeiss

In this video we start by crossing over the Sava River to explore New Belgrade, slowly making our way towards the well-known [in the Brutalist Architecture movement] Genex Tower as we shoot and compare images from two very different film cameras. 

In this video you can see the Leica Summicron-C 40mm f2 Leica M-mount lens compared to the Carl Zeiss Tessar 45mm f2.8 for Contax/Yashica mount. 

The difference in price between these two setups is over $1300, while most of that difference is made up of the price of the camera bodies, the point is, in my opinion, once you are willing to spend $200 to $300 on a film camera lens, the quality of the results are subjective compared to that of anything costIng higher I’m most situations.

Additionally, in the images from the video above, we not only have different lenses and films, but with a film speed of 100 in the Leica, I was able and chose to shoot nearly all the images at f2. At least half of the images taken on the Contax are shot at f5.6.

This means the images from the Contax will be sharper and have a less shallow depth of field. Though, for me what is attractive about the Carl Zeiss Tessar 45mm f2.8 compared to the Leica Summicron-C is the wonderful dark and dynamic contrast it renders to the images. It’s possible it is the Kodak Gold giving extra contrast over the Kodak Pro Image 100 - but I’m set on believing it is the lens.