In light of some of the recent questions on which 50mm lens would be best, I thought I'd present some tests that I have in a document called the BAS report."BAS" stands for Barnim A. Schultze, the engineer that conducted the testing. This document is from June 1996, and was acquired in London at "Classic Camera", a Leica Shoppe there.

As far as I know, this lab is no longer functioning, and I could not find any follow-up testing. Therefore, the lenses tested stop at 1996, so some of the lenses represented are a generation behind, (the 35mm Summicron is the pre-aspheric).

I tried very hard to locate and get permission to reproduce these test as an information sharing exercise only, but I can not find any listing for BAS labs. All copyrights would go to those labs, and the reports are for information only.

Please read the first document which explains the information that will be found in the actual reports. Leica 50mm tests for all current models

-- Al Smith (smith58@msn.com), May 05, 2002

Answers

Al:

Thanks for the post. While not excessivly revealing of any new information for us, I found it curious that the Elmar received the same score as the Noctilux, AND that the Summilux and Summicron were rated so closely... These relative rankings of the Noct, 'Lux and 'Cron echo what my own experience has revealed, but are perhaps in a bit of conflict with contemporary thought. Also, while I've never owned one to test, I thought the Elmar was reputed to perform more on par with the 'Cron... Interesting reports -- do you know if they performed them for other M lenses?

-- Jack Flesher (jbflesher@msn.com), May 05, 2002.

Yes Jack, I have the report from June 1996 and it has every Leica M lens from that vintage. I just limited this to 50mm lens because of some recent threads.

-- Al Smith (smith58@msn.com), May 05, 2002.

Does this dude test other brands as well, for comparison purposes, or does he adhere to the established Dutch model of "if it doesn't say Leica, it isn't worth spit"?

-- Keith Davis (leica4ever@yahoo.com), May 05, 2002.

Al - thanks for doing this, but the way you've currently done it results in individual pages of 2MB each. Any way for you to save the document as a more reasonably sized PDF? If you could then I'd be more than happy to add the document to the Leica FAQ.

-- Andrew Nemeth (azn@nemeng.com), May 05, 2002.

Hi Al,

you are right, the inventor of the BAS test, Barnim A. Schultze, is out of business, because he died some years ago. He runned his lab for lens tests for decades. One of his customers was fotoMAGAZIN, one of the two important German magazine for amateur photography. The BAS lens ratings were/are higly appreciated by the German speaking readers of fotoMAGAZIN. During his life Mr. Schultze checked hundreds of lenses of different brands for fotoMAGAZIN. The 50 mm lens test you mention was made for Leica. Because the guys in Solms trusted in the BAS lens test procedure they asked Mr. Schultze to test the complete Leica lens program. Meanwhile a young man continues the improved BAS lens test. His name is Anders Uschold, an engineer in Munich/Germany. As a former editor of fotoMAGAZIN I had the joy to cooperate with Barnim Schultze until 1995. Very often my (subjective) impressions of a lens were proven by his (objective) measurements. That's why I am really convinced of the BAS tests. Best regards

-- Frank Thoma (Thoma2811@aol.com), May 05, 2002.