Jupiter 8 50 mm f/2.0 lens on Sony NEX 6

This is a short post about using an M39 mount Jupiter 8 50 mm manual lens on the Sony NEX 6 camera with an E-Mount to M39 adaptor.

Jupiter 8 Images

Jupiter 8 Description

My Jupiter 8 is the only m39 manual lens I own that I actually know the history of. It was fitted to a Zorki 4 camera which my father bought from new in the 1970s and which I acquired a couple of years ago when he gave it to me. Consequently, it is in the best condition of the soviet era lenses which I own.

It’s a very small lens, which I suppose is typical of m39 lenses, with a filter diameter of only 40.5 mm and a length of about the same. The focal length is 50 mm which means it becomes a short telephoto lens on my NEX 6 when the crop factor is taken into account. Because it was originally made for a rangefinder camera, the registration distance (the distance from the back of the lens to the film plane or sensor) is quite short which means that for my NEX 6 it has a much slimmer adaptor than any of the lenses I have which were made for SLR’s. When fitted to the NEX it makes the whole package very small and light.

The aperture range of f/2.0 to f/22 has no click stops so can be set to any value within that range. The aperture itself has 8 blades, so fairly circular as it stops down.

The pictures taken with this lens have a 1960s ‘soft’ look and any background defocus has the characteristic swirlyness which people come to expect in lenses made in this era. When stopped down it becomes a bit sharper, but it never has the definition of, for example, the Takumar M42 28 mm or the Pentax K-Mount 50 mm I own. The sample images below were all taken a few days ago in Stevenage and have been post-processing in Lightroom.

Jupiter 8 sample pictures