It had a cropped sensor, 1.56x crop if I remember rightly. I used to shoot R-D1 nearly as much as I did the Voigtlander R2a I had contemporary to it.

My early experiences with film rangefinders were often accompanied by experiences with a digital rangefinder the Epson R-D1. So how did I end up in this situation for so long? Well, fortunately I have a fairly reasonable justification for the original purchase.

2 The fast/expensive lens misconception.

It’s felt like the lens has been hanging around waiting for that moment where my photography finally finds a way to release its potential. It’s sold now, this time for good, and parting with it after all that time and multiple ownerships has been an almost cathartic experience. I suppose that’s what driving me to write this post, this disparity between perceived need and actual need was so great that it caused me to continue to own a lens, be convinced it was of use to me, but not use it in any serious way for years. Yet despite this “need”, I never found a time I actually required the lens to take a photo I wished to take.

The whole time I had it, and the reason I bought it back was because I kept in the back of my mind that I “needed” a fast 28mm.

I hadn’t used it much when I’d first had it, I didn’t miss it when I was gone, and when I bought it back, I still didn’t use it. I even sold the f/1.9 once before to my mate Ben, though for reasons I can’t quite explain, I ended up buying it back off him when he picked up the newer f/2 version. I’ve sold it now – a few weeks ago in fact – though really it was replaced as a focal length by the tiny Voigtlander 28mm f/3.5 quite some time before it went. I owned this lens for years, but I very rarely used it, not because it’s not a good lens, but just because it wasn’t quite right for me… And that’s despite the fact that I spent the entire time I owned it trying to convince myself that it was. It is instead intended as a cautionary tale of a mentality I’ve suffered through owning one of these lenses a negative mentality, that it would be unfair to hold the lens responsible for. Before I get into this, I just want to point out, this isn’t intended as a negative slant against the Voigtlander 28mm f/1.9.

Voigtlander 28mm 1.9