Way back in the ancient days of yore, a Japanese company called Cosina made budget cameras and lenses for a variety of manufacturers. Their products were designed for a certain market - the skinflint. They were unafraid to use plastic in an era where almost every lens and body was made of precious, sleek, cool metal. Their lenses sure transmitted light, and were usually the cheapest thing out there before the fall of the USSR. They produced the same basic camera for Nikon, Olympus, and others in the entry level market. They did well for themselves, but were always known as a sort of bargain basement alternative to real photo gear.
A few years ago, they decided to do something they had not done in a long time - release their own camera. Unlike the previous Cosina branded cameras, this was a Leica screw mount (39mm) body, which looked an awful lot like a dozen other Cosina made cameras. It had no focusing aid - you guessed the distance and set it on the lens. They also released a 15mm lens and a 25mm lens, neither of which was RF coupled. The body and lenses were budget priced, but well made.
Holy crap, did they take the world by storm. They licensed the hallowed and ancient Voigtlander name to lend themselves an air of quality. Other cameras followed, in both Leica M and screw mounts, and in Contax RF and the closely related Nikon RF mounts as well. They had rangefinders and later combined RF / VF systems. They were built well, although not to the same standards as a $3000 Leica. But Cosina was not aiming for the same market as Leica, at least not initially. They were looking to resurrect a market that hadn't existed since the 1960's - reasonably priced, high quality interchangeable lens RF cameras for the masses.
In the mid 1960's, the pentaprism SLR (specifically the Nikon F) suddenly became the camera of choice for the professional photographer working in 35mm. SLRs have a number of advantages over rangefinders. They show you what is in focus directly. With a RF you have to trust that all the little parts in the lens AND the camera are perfectly aligned. An SLR doesn't require you to trust. It shows you directly what is in focus. Rangefinder cameras are lousy for macro and telephoto work. The RF's viewfinder shows you an image that is not coaxial to the lens, so the relative placement of objects is not the same as that which will be recorded when you trip the shutter. The rangefinder has some delicate parts which tend to come out of whack and require periodic realignment. The lenses also have moving parts, which transmit the focus distance to the camera's RF. So the pros started moving over to the Nikon F, and later to the host of other SLR cameras that proliferated. When the pros start buying a photo related product, so do the consumers, and within a few years the previously thriving RF market had been completely abandoned except by Leica, who continued making high quality, high priced RF cameras and lenses, and they were content to have this market all to themselves. The rangefinder camera was relegated to the RF focusing P&S camera market, finally dying out completely once autofocus hit the scene in the 1980s.
Rangefinders have a couple of advantages over SLRs, though. They are generally much quieter, as there is no mirror that has to slam out of the optical path at the last second as in SLRs. They are thinner and thus often lighter. The lenses can be designed to have the rear element in close proximity to the film plane, which gives optical designers the opportunity to make smaller, lighter lenses. Wide angle lenses in particular benefit from this arrangement, and tend to be better on RF cameras. Did I mention that the lenses are smaller? It's common to find lenses for SLRs that are many times the volume of an equivalent RF lens, and rare to impossible to find SLR lenses that are as small. The greybeards, nerds, and jewelry customers sought out Leica products and older RF cameras for their size and quality, and this is how it was for a very long time. If you wanted a new RF camera, it was a Leica that you bought. If you wanted to save a bit of money, you got a used Leica. All the while, Leica slowly decreased the build quality of their cameras, increased the prices, and hardly evolved their bricklike cameras at all. To be fair, they have continually innovated their lens lineup, and have always produced top rate lenses.
This brings us to the present day. Leica now has serious competition. Cosina made such high quality lenses that seemingly overnight a cult has formed around them. The Carl Zeiss Foundation chose Cosina to manufacture a line of M mount Zeiss lenses and an M mount Zeiss Ikon RF camera. Zeiss also chose Cosina to produce a line of very high quality Nikon F mount manual focus lenses, as Cosina had great success making a line of SLR lenses in various deceased mounts. They also produced the Bessaflex, an M42 mount high quality SLR camera.
I bought the Epson R-D1 digital RF camera (which is based on the Cosina Voigtlander Bessa R2 film camera, with only the digital guts from Epson) almost exactly a year ago to take with me to Japan, as the compact digicams on the market just don't do it for me. I obviously needed some lenses to go with it, and Cosina's Voigtlander line was the obvious place to look for these. Let's see, I could get one decent Leica lens, or a whole lineup of CV lenses for the same price. I had heard nothing but good things about the CV lenses, so I bought a whole lineup sight unseen. I will review each of these individually in the future, so a quick rundown of their features should suffice for now. They are all built out of metal and glass, with no plastic at all. Some have lacquered brass barrels and some have anodized or powder coated aluminum. They are all very solid optical performers. They are very innovative optically, especially within their price bracket. The finders that accompany the wide lenses are great.
So let's hear it for Cosina, who seems to me to be one of the leading innovators in the photography world today.
