This thread should be taken with a grain of salt.

Leave that heavy silver chrome aspheric at home this afternoon. Instead,with 100 ISO in your new M7, fit the latest "Instamatic" type concept .....both lighter in weight to the 2.8/50 Elmar collapsible and only one stop slower than a Tri-Elmar....

The 50mm f5.6 FIXED APERTURE optic! ....Super lightweight, theorical optimum bokeh and with performance honed to it's only aperture. It comes with a built in miniature fixed lens hood and optically flat (screw in to top of hood), two stop neutral density filter. Focus is achieved via small focus lever.

The shortcomings in aperture and versatility of function are more than obvious, but as a concept and ode to the humble Kodak Instamatic, could this design really work? And with what theoretical weight, performance and dimension characteristics?

-- Sheridan Zantis (albada60@hotmail.com), May 24, 2002

Answers

As an ode to the Instamatic, forget it. As a special purpose APO quality lens, that might be another story. Maybe for photomapping or something.

-- Bob Fleischman (RFXMAIL@prodigy.net), May 24, 2002.

Sheridan; Sometimes the 28mm F6 is my weird lens of the day to use....It is a short lightweight LTM aluminum mount lens...It actually couples to the rangefinder...This is 28mm / f=6 russian lens Orion 15Kelly

-- Kelly Flanigan (zorki3c@netscape.net), May 24, 2002.

Actually...

Leica made a couple of fixed-focus 35s over the years. Most were 'fixed' at a close-focusing distance for Germany postal employees to record meter reading of some kind (telephone?) - anyway guages on the outside of consumers homes like american electric/gas/water meters.

But I think there was also a 'snapshot-Elmar' or something like that briefly in the '30's. They didn't even bother with focusing levers - just set it for 3 meters or something similar at the factory.

-- Andy Piper (apidens@denver.infi.net), May 25, 2002.

Isn't that essentially a Rollei 35?

-- Tse-Sung (tsesung@yahoo.com), May 25, 2002.

The snapshot lens you can actually buy and use right now is the 24/2.8 asph at f16.

-- rob (rob@robertappleby.com), May 25, 2002.

OR: The Cosina/Voigtlander 25 at f8 & be there.

Snap/Click

-- richardjx@hotmail.com (richardjx@hotmail.com), May 25, 2002.

Or scale focus on a Minox 35.

-- Jack Matlock (jfmatlo@attglobal.net), May 25, 2002.

Fixed focus Minox EC with 15mm f/5.6 lens

Shutter speed from 8 sec to 1/500 sec

Sharp from 1 meter to infinity

weight only 2 oz

-- martin tai (martin.tai@capcanada.com), May 25, 2002.