Leica lens on Nikon

[morganlashley]

I bought a Leica 100mm macro lens at a charity flea market for $50...is there

any way to mount this on my D200?

[dan_fromm2]

Short answer, NO.

 

Long answer, if you want to give up infinity focus and diaphragm automation and meter coupling, maybe. The Nikon F flange-to-film distance is 46.5 mm, Leica R is 47.0. That leaves very little room for a mount adapter that will preserve infinity focus. If there is, and you can find, a female Leica R-to-male T adapter or a female Leica R-to-male M39 (Leitz or Novoflex may have made one, looking is your job, not mine) then you can use the lens for macro work. There are female M39-to-male Nikon F adapters around, Nikon El-F and Novoflex NIKLEI (several flavors).

[walterh]

I must admit I am no expert on Leica lenses and may not have much to add to Dan's answer - but I know that some or at least one macro lens could easily be disassembled and also was available as just the lens head for bellows operation. As far as I remember that was a 90mm lens. If the lens is optically excellent I would check if it can easily be taken apart and remounted in a way you can use it on a bellows. In fact this is the only use that really makes sense.

 

For the Leica experts it might help to give more info on the lens like type of mount, speed and serial number. A post on the Leica forum pointing to this thread might help more or have this thread point to a new post in the Leica forum would be even better.

 

Another thing is that dedicated macro lenses are usually optimized for a certain image ratio like 1:1 or 1:10 and give poor performance at infinity. Some of "old" lens designs beat many modern design (trying to cover 1:1 to infinity) within their range of best performance. I use my best macro lenses only for macro and I could not care less about AF or infinity performance.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Walter

[shawn_rahman]

How about selling the lens for 10 times that price and buying a great Nikon lens you can mount?

[User_502260]

I remember three Leica 100mm macro lenses: 100/4 Bellows, 100/4 w/focusing helicoid and 100/2.8 APO w/focusing helicoid. By using any of these lenses with a Nikon you will have to stop the lens down manually. With the right Nikon bellows and some adapters you might even be able to get the 100/4 bellows lens to reach infinity focus. The other two lenses still sell for so much that the advice to sell it and get one that fits the Nikon properly is probably good. Either of the lenses with focusing helicoids could be used with an adapter on a Canon DSLR and some people do that.

[SCL]

I don't believe the specific lens you have separates into a lenshead for use on a Visoflex and focusing mount, or it is an R lens; you can mount it via adapters...but it won't focus to infinity. <p>

Now, if it is an R lens, you can, via adapters, mount it on certain Canon bodies and get infinity focus, but not on a Nikon body.

[gator1999]

I concur to Shawn, sell the Leica and get a Nikon 105mm Macro, AFD or AFS, to use with D200. As you may experience, manual focusing on D200 is a pain on a. If Nikon can come up with a K-screen to be used on D200, it might be the hottest screen in the Nikon history. As for the quality, as comparing with the Leica 100f4 and Nikon 105AFD, the Nikon is simply much much much better for both color redemption and contrast. The resolution is about the same for both lens. I havn't tried the Leica 100APO but heard it's ultra expensive.

 

I used a Summicron-R 50mm on D200 with an adaptor with carefully insulate it with thin film tape (in case not to short the D200 electronics). The result is really so-so while comparing to the Nikon 50f1.8 non-D.

[chris_vincent2]

Yes. Place the D200 on a concrete floor with the mount facing upwards. Put the lens on the camera and then hit it repeatedly from above with a 20 pound hammer until it fits.

 

This works best if you are dressed as a chicken at the time and have your boots filled with custard.

[morganlashley]

I didn't realize the value of this lens nor did the charity event as it was part of a donated estate....So, I returned it to the charity and informed them of the true value, somewhere around $2000....

[petrana_batik]

FWIW, It was a macro lens, you shouldn't therefore have cared about infinity focus; if that was the case, there are adapters available.

[joseph_wisniewski]

Thomas - "If Nikon can come up with a K-screen to be used on D200, it might be the hottest screen in the Nikon history."

 

There are a couple of nice ones in the aftermarket. Rachael Katz (Katz Eye Optics) makes an excellent one, it's what I use. A lower cost one is produced under the "Houdia" (I think) name and only sold on the auction site who's name we must never mention.

[fourfa]

Did you mean "Haoda Fu?"

[joseph_wisniewski]

Andy, yup that would be them.