On Mar 7, 2006, at 10:40 PM, Shel Belinkoff wrote:
When I heard about lenses without aperture rings, I was upset. How
dare
they! Then, after using the istDS, and being able to adjust the
aperture
from the camera body, I could see some real advantages. However, I
still
like lenses with aperture settings, but then, I still like old Leicas,
Pentax screw mounts and K bodies. But there are some advantages to
controlling the aperture from the body, and as long as you're doing
that,
the aperture ring serves no purpose.
The first series of lenses for a 35mm SLR that had no aperture rings
were the Carl Zeiss lenses for Contarex cameras, first introduced in
1958. Aperture was set using a control wheel on the camera body. In
this photo of the original Contarex you can see the control wheel to
the left of the lens:
http://www.mediajoy.com/en/cla_came/contarex/index.html
You can click through the photos to see how this worked.
So, you see we've come full circle back to an idea which was really
new in 1958! It just took everyone else this long to catch up to Zeiss.
Bob
