If you are a rangefinder user, I am sure you have considered buying one of those dirt cheap Russian LTM lenses that have  flooded eBay. LTM lenses rose to the prominence in 30s and 40s with the ascention of Leica Screw Mount cameras. Numerous 'Leica Copies' have accelerated the adoption of the standard and a large number of manufacturers, including the fledging Japanese camera makers like Canon and Nikon began to manufacture LTM lenses. The birth of Russian LTM lenses can be traced to the 30s and the first FED camera, which utilized the M39 mount, as the Leica Screw Thread became to be known. After the defeat of Nazi Germany in WWII, Russians 'appropriated' the original optical equipment and designs from Carl Zeiss factory in Jena. Carl Zeiss know-how was one of the most prized posessions of the post-war era and helped accelerate innovation in the USSR's optical/photography industry, which was pretty much leveled with the ground over the five years of war. Most of the early Russian lens designs trace their roots to Carl Zeiss designs. The Jena factory continued its production under the Communist regime, but Russians also jump-started their own factories, most notably in Krasnogorsk (the KMZ factory) and later also expanded production to Arsenal Kiev, Litkarino, Lvov, Kharkov and Kazan factories. But KMZ remained the epicenter of the innovation and most original Russian designs were originated there.

However, while there are a lot of Russian lenses available on eBay, figuring out what is what is fairly hard - the Russian lens nomenklature is pretty confusing at times and often archaic. This guide tries to bring a little bit more clarity into this subject. We will focus only on Russian LTM lenses in this article - there is also a very wide range of Russian lenses available in Pentax M42/K mount as well as Contax mount, but these will be covered in a separate article at a later time. The main audience for this article should be a user, an active photographer if you will, rather than a collector. While some Russian lenses may bear collectible value, I am no expert in anything collectible and so am going to leave this topic to someone else. Hence the article will focus on lenses that are relatively easy to obtain on used markets and will be omitting all prototype and limited production lens. The article consists of three parts - the first part you are reading now will try to document all known Russian LTM lenses with same key statistics like rated resolution, pricing and availability. The second and third parts are oriented towards the practicioner who wants to see beyond the basic information and get a better feel about more subjective qualities of individual lenses. This is not a detailed review that you might be accustomed to if you're a regular here - if anyone decides to learn a bit more about a particular lens, he/she is advised to visit the full features lens reviews section.

With the noise level surrounding anything that has the word 'mirrorless' in it reaching astronomic proportions, we want to poke a bit of fun at all the rumor mill sites (we still love you though since you give us all an almost endless source of discussions) and come up with our own half-serious and half-not so much predictions for 2012. We even came up with our own 'hotness' indicator and grade, from highest to lowest - LP1, LP2, LP3, LP4, LP5. If you wonder what LP means - we don't know that either, but we will remind these grades to you every so often, so you just don't forget them. Seriously though, we've witnessed quite a few photo-equipment generation and so predictions below are not completely baseless - these are based on overall observations of where the market and individual players are and where they are moving. History often repeats itself and this cycle is not an exception in our belief.

And so, our predictions for year 2012.... Drum-roll please...

• Sony will announce a high end FF mirrorless [LP1]
• Canon will introduce APS-C sized mirrorless fully backward compatible with EF/EF-S mount [LP1]
• Pentax Q system will be discontinued in favor of a different mirrorless platform (GXR/K-01) [LP1]
• Nikon will drastically drop prices on V1/J1 and will introduce a higher MP sensors for the system [LP1]
• Nikon will introduce APS-C sensor in V system [LP3]
• Samsung NX will continue to be completely unappreciated and all for good reasons [LP1]
• Leica will introduce another 'Limited Edition' something that would have no real value to photographers but would still sell well [LP1]
• Panasonic will flood the markets with more m4/3 cameras completely confusing prospective buyers who will move on and instead buy a Sony NEX system [LP1]
• The euphoria around Fuji X-Pro1 system will fade and the company will go back to what it does best - making color film and color faxes [LP2]
• Carl Zeiss will not introduce any cameras, mirrorless or otherwise [LP1]
• Ricoh GXR will continue to be the poster child of a select few online reviewers, but otherwise would not even generate a blip of interest among the mainstreams [LP1]
• Sigma will discontinue DP2x and nobody will notice [LP2]

Let's revisit this topic next yearand see how well we fared...

So it has been a couple of weeks since I upgraded the back-end and the front-end for the SLR Lens Review. So far everything seems to work as expected for the most part. You might encounter one of the following two errors, both of which are temporary

• Internal Server Error (sometimes error 500) - this is due to a new image gallery plugin that I am using. It tries to generate thumbnails the first time someone navigates to a page with a gallery, but times out on large galleries. Clicking reload  refreshes the plugin and it reloads all thumbnails. Once all pages with galleries have been hit at least once, this error will disappear for good.
• No Input File Specified - this is a caching error which happens once in a while when I push a new update to the site. Cleaning up browser cache solves this 100% of time. Sometimes it gets solved if you simply refresh the page. You should no longer see this error since I am basically done with all the updates/migrations (well, all except for the user reviews, which should come online this weekend)

Unfortunately, site performance still leaves room for improvement. I upgraded to the premium plan with my hosting provider but that did not get me much, as it seems the pipe on this shared content DC is just too congested. I am looking for alternative options potentially with other hosts.

SLR Lens Review turned five! It's hard to imagine that five years ago, the site went live with its first lens review - Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM. 150+ reviews later, here we are with a new redesign, new features and new goals. Well, goals actually remain the same - deliver you lens reviews first and foremost, but the scope of this goal changes a little bit. Instead of cranking out reviews as quickly as possible just to increase an article count, we're going to focus on improving quality of the reviews. This will probably mean slowing down somewhat - while it used to take about a week in the early days to test a lens and finish a review, lately it's been taking more like 3 weeks to wrap up with all the testings alone. Why the slow down, you might ask? Firstly, the scope of the reviews has been growing steadily over the years - five years ago the reviews contained only MTF test data from Imatest, then limited field testing was added, then field testing was expanded a bit, then expanded a bit more, and later a bit more again. All this requires additional time and with a busy work-day schedule this also means longer time lags. But don't fear - the reviews will continue and currently you should expect to see one to two new reviews per month.

The second objective is to begin offering more comprehensive lens comparisons. In the past, lens benchmarks were sporadic and did not follow any particular format. While not sure about the format for such comparisons yet, peer to peer lens comparisons will become more frequent. As a matter of fact, the first such comparison this year will pick up where the old Macro Challenge left off - wrapping up with a detailed contrast of 4 macro lenses: Canon EF 100/2.8, Zeiss Makro Planar 100/2, Leica APO Macro Elmarit 100/2.8 and Voigtlander APO Macro Lanthar 125/2.5. Expect that review to pop up in early February.