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It had been almost a month since I ordered it from rugift.com, but my new Jupiter-9 85mm f/2 finally arrived this last Tuesday. As expected, it came in a box with string binding and lots of Cyrillic writing on the labels.
I was a bit disturbed by the packing method. Inside were about three pages of crumpled Russian newspaper and the OPEN plastic display case with the lens manual stuffed inside. The case, the base for the case and the lens itself were loose and separate inside the box. Since the base serves as the rear lens cap, the rear element apparently managed the trip exposed to the world. The lens was quite dusty and covered overall by a thin coating of some sort of black sooty material.
I set about to clean the dust and soot off. Once that was done, everything looked a lot better. There were no scratches on the rear element despite its naked ride. The general construction of the lens is pretty sturdy and the level of finish is surprisingly good. The satin black enamel is evenly applied and all surfaces are smooth and well-finished. The only exception being the dabs of black paint applied over the set screws for the focus and pre-set rings. Both the focus and aperture mechanisms worked smoothly with no binding or roughness. (Very stiff, but smooth none-the-less.)
While the lens is supposed to be multi-coated, the coating on the front element must be really subtle. You can see that the inner and rear elements are coated, but the front reflects clean, white light. While the coatings probably help reduce flare, my initial test shots in bright sunlight show that a hood is indicated. Speaking of the front element...it is one heck of a big piece of glass and has rather little protection from the lens body (shallow setting). Gazing past the front element into lens itself, the 16 curved diaphragm blades are visible in all their glory. As with all J-9's, mine has light-colored metal blades. A few on my copy have a slight smear of what appears to be oil.
My initial and lasting impression is that the lens is on the heavy side. Not particularly bulky, but definitely dense. The combination of mass and the stiffness of the controls makes taking pictures a ponderous exercise. Both focusing and changing/actuating the aperture requires two opposing fingers on the rings. No quick flicking of the aperture pre-set ring on this baby! The focus movement from 0.8m to infinity requires about 300 degrees of viscous arc.
Typical of most screw-mount lenses, metering on the K10D is inaccurate at wider apertures. The J-9 allows for stop-down metering in both AV and manual modes with both modes showing a distinct tendency to underexpose at apertures wider than f/5.6. (At f/2 the bias is about 2.5 stops!) The photographer should use caution regardless of mode to avoid entry of light through the viewfinder window when metering! Apparently, once the lens is stopped down, the light entering the prism from the back may become much more significant. I was working on the tripod and taking my eye away from the camera for the exposure. Imagine my surprise when f/8 at 1/30th second exposure in AV mode became 1/250th second when I moved back from the camera.
Now for the moment you have all been waiting for...Ta-Da!...the optical performance! Once I got the hang of working the aperture pre-set and focusing with the limited depth-of-field, I can report that I am pretty pleased with the results. The J-9's bokeh lives up to its reputation...smooth, smooth, smooth. The J-9 is definitely soft wide open and remains so at f/2.8. Acceptable sharpness begins at f/4 and becomes impressive at f/5.6 - f/16. That being said, I must note that decreased contrast due to flare can take the edge off that sharpness. Color rendition is really impressive. I usually don't gush, but I love the Jupiter's rendition of both subtle and garish tones.
Below are a few test shots from my back yard under diffuse daylight:
f/4 full-image, no post-processing:
100% crop from the above:
f/8 full-image, no post-processing:
100% crop from the above:
The images suffered a little from the reduction and jpeg conversion, but I think the results are acceptable.
New Jupiter-9 shopping list:
- Lens hood
- Rear lens cap
- Snap-on front lens cap
Last edited by stevebrot; 04-04-2008 at 12:17 AM.