Rollei 40mm f2.8 HFT
Filed in - Other brands (RF) - October 12, 2007This lens results from Rollei’s brief flirtation with the modern rangefinder market courtesy of Cosina. It was always a bit half-hearted and when the market didn’t leap at the opportunity of a minor Cosina variant with an ostentatious badge on it what heart there was seemed to leave the project and the cameras and lenses sat around at the photo equivalents of remaindered bookstores. The cameras and some of the lenses are, in fact, still available at the time of writing.
From what I’ve read of the related camera it is a bit nicer than the Cosina equivalent – mostly in terms of being able to see the framelines even if a glasses wearer. However, the real interest in the Rollei experiment comes with the lenses. Rollei’s choice of a 40mm focal length played heavily on their shirt pocket cameras from the past, so despite the slightly odd focal length for a rangefinder, the main Rollei branded lens for the system was a 40mm Sonnar. The lens chassis is evidently a Cosina one (and the Cosina LH2 lenshood is a good match for it), and the design is, by definition from Zeiss.
This is a screen grab from Rollei Japan (complete with heritage background):
What you don’t get from that picture is the idea that this is a very small lens. Smaller, with catalogue specifications of 175grms, 39mm filter thread and body length of 30,5mm, than any current Zeiss design. The obvious trade off being the f2.8 maximum aperture. Reviews at the time of the lens’ release (e.g. PopPhoto) scored the lens fairly well both objectively and subjectively.
Users report that ‘typical Sonnar look’. The Sonnar Look is one of those phrases that gets bandied around and I’ve never been entirely sure whether it means something or nothing. Certainly the only sonnar designed lens that I’ve ever used has a look, and that look is the out of focus look (the Zeiss ZM Sonnar 50mm f1.5 exhibits considerable focus drift as aperture changes).
I might investigate the term further in conjunction with some actual results from this lens (it was in use today). The original Rollei brochure (which is still available via various web archive sources) contained MTF charts for the lens, but, as is not uncommon, the charts were not properly annotated meaning that interpreting them involved a lot of guesswork. What you can see, though, even without a proper explanation, is some way out variation in the curves.
Although undoubtedly a Sonnar in design, the 40mm is both slower and wider than the norm. It got re-made here because of the history, but why Rollei had a point-and-shoot with a 40mm lens in the first place I don’t know. Possibly because 40mm is an easy length for which to make small lenses on the 35mm film format. All that I can say at the moment is that the lens looks just right on my 40mm Ikon (the 40mm Rokkor did indeed have a lot of dust on it when I grabbed it this morning and it needs a proper clean).
40mm is actually closer to a “normal” lens than 50mm. Calculating the hypotenuse of the 35mm frame dimensions gives ~43mm, which approximates the field of view of human sight without peripheral vision. Hence, it is a more or less natural or “normal” view of a scene, at least photographically speaking.
I use Olympus 35SP cameras as my default RF gear, but I am going to get an interchangeable mount body or two and the Rollei Sonnar 40/2.8 will be high on my list of “must have” glass. I love the look it gives, and while the Zeiss Sonnar 1.5 is better suited to a lot of the low light scenes I shoot, f2.8 is fine for many situations.
October 30, 2008 @ 4:58 pm