Nicht immer nur Kaviar ... (English Version)

[UliWer]

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Albert Schacht Ulm mainly produced lenses for SLR cameras, like the Exakta and the Edixa.

Though some lenses were also issued with 39mm LTM mount:

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Here you see the 1:3.5/35mm Travegon, the 1:3.5/135mm Travenar and the 1:2.8/90mm Travenar. Though Schacht had the habit to add an "R" behind the focal length, they were never meant to fit the Leica-R, but only the screw-mount bodies and the M with an adapter.

The optical designer for these lenses was Ludwig Bertele, who did this for Schacht freelancing from his main occupation of designing air surveillance lenses for the  Suisse Wild Heerbrugg AG. If one didn't know this fact one wouldn't guess it, as the Schacht lenses show no typical "Sonnar" imprint, for which Bertele became famous. They are decent performers, but completely neutral. 

The 35mm Travegon is almost too big for a screw-mount Leica, while the 90mm Travegon is a real tele design and even shorter than the fat Tele-Elmarit. 

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[UliWer]

Here is a document I found elsewhere in the web:
 

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E.Leitz Instruments Ltd. Mortimer Street, London, in June 1969 announces the three Schacht lenses as a novelty for users of screw-mount Leicas (though of course they mentioned the adapter). This must have been one of the last marketing efforts for the Schacht lenses, as their production ended completely in 1970.

[willeica]

Got this last week from Leitz Auction. Leica Standard with Dallmeyer Dallon Tele-Anastigmat 4" f5.6 lens. This came with a lens hood and a yellow filter. For actual use a rangefinder and/or 100mm (or so) viewfinder would be useful. These were originally put on I Model As with a screwmount and a swing mask as part of the first ever interchangeable lens set up for a Leica. Sinclairs in London did some of the conversions. Lenses by Dallmeyer and Ross for LTM mounts continued to be made for some time. This is the third example that I have. I already have a Leica with a Dallmeyer C Mount lens and another one with a Ross Teleros lens. 

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William 

 

[Guest]

Two Leitz bellows II units with multi-coated 135mm and 150mm EL-Nikkor A lenses. With full metal enclosures and 12 aperture blades, these lenses ooze quality.

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[zeitz]

8 hours ago, Studienkamera said:

Two Leitz bellows II units with multi-coated 135mm and 150mm EL-Nikkor A lenses. With full metal enclosures and 12 aperture blades, these lenses ooze quality.

Have you tried a Focotar-II?

[Pyrogallol]

This just arrived in the post. A Zeiss Tenax, model 1 from 1938/9. All appears to work. Lens front has decades of cleaning marks but otherwise looks ok.

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[Guest]

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8 hours ago, zeitz said:

Have you tried a Focotar-II?

I don’t have one. Very hard to find. I have a V-Elmar, but it needs cleaning.

[PG Black nickel]

Little Christmas quiz ...
It's a camera, but who will know how to recognize it ?

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[romanus53]

Stylophot?

[PG Black nickel]

No…

[pgk]

Grubb Lenses. Two Grubb Doublets, both of which were manufactured prior to Dallmeyer's patent for the 'Rapid Rectilinear':

Rudolf Kingslake, for a long time head of optical design at Kodak, havesuggested that “two Grubb [Patent] Aplanats placed symmetrically around a central stop (Rudolf Kingslake, “A History of the Photographic Lens” Chapter 4 IV. B.) would have been similar to a lens which was subsequently patented in 1865 (granted in 1866) by London based optician Dallmeyer (and simultaneously by Stenheil of Munich on the continent) and indeed, that it may have been this combination which was the inspiration for Dallmeyer’s design (he stated:“Grubb’s lens was so similar to the rear half of the Rapid Rectilinear lens announced in 1866 that one wonders whether Dallmeyer merely assembled two of Grubb’s objectives around a central stop to make his famous lens”). In fact Kingslake described the famous Rapid Rectilinear lens, as Dallmeyer’s patented lens design become known, as “one of the most important photographic objectives ever made”.

These are two of only five of these Grubb Doublets which I have been able to discover which have survived. Most Grubb lenses look as though they have been hard used!

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.

[sabears]

4 hours ago, PG Black nickel said:

Little Christmas quiz ...
It's a camera, but who will know how to recognize it ?

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... gun camera fitted to the Luftwaffe's aircraft?

[willeica]

24 minutes ago, pgk said:

Grubb Lenses. Two Grubb Doublets, both of which were manufactured prior to Dallmeyer's patent for the 'Rapid Rectilinear':

Rudolf Kingslake, for a long time head of optical design at Kodak, havesuggested that “two Grubb [Patent] Aplanats placed symmetrically around a central stop (Rudolf Kingslake, “A History of the Photographic Lens” Chapter 4 IV. B.) would have been similar to a lens which was subsequently patented in 1865 (granted in 1866) by London based optician Dallmeyer (and simultaneously by Stenheil of Munich on the continent) and indeed, that it may have been this combination which was the inspiration for Dallmeyer’s design (he stated:“Grubb’s lens was so similar to the rear half of the Rapid Rectilinear lens announced in 1866 that one wonders whether Dallmeyer merely assembled two of Grubb’s objectives around a central stop to make his famous lens”). In fact Kingslake described the famous Rapid Rectilinear lens, as Dallmeyer’s patented lens design become known, as “one of the most important photographic objectives ever made”.

These are two of only five of these Grubb Doublets which I have been able to discover which have survived. Most Grubb lenses look as though they have been hard used!

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.

Lovely, Paul. These are rare indeed. I have just emailed you some comments from a friend of mine, who is Professor of Optics, about these and the Dallmeyer RR lens. These comments are based on a publication by Herbert Gross, the former Head of Optical Design at Zeiss. These are truly historically significant items, not just based on Kingslake's assessment . 

This was also obvious from the recent talk at the Leica Society International Conference in Dublin by Peter Karbe, Head of Lens design at Leica, about what led up to the modern apochromatic lenses. The whole concept of compensating lens elements starts here. While Peter did not mention these specifically it was obvious that he was talking about the same thing. 

William 

[PG Black nickel]

Yes,

It is a camera for fighter planes. It is a French camera of mark OPL (Foca) model 1923. It was used for the instruction of the pilots for the shootings with the machine-gun with which it was coupled in order to check on the prints the accuracy of the shootings. 
It is in a wooden box adapted with the tools and the spare parts.
The lens is an OPL 170 mm F5. 120 mm Kodak film. 15 frames.
It is quite imposing it measures about 40 cm and weighs about 5 kilos....

 

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[thomas_schertel]

Two Tenax I and Tenax II

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yours sincerely
Thomas

[pgk]

Another Grubb lens. This one dates probably from the 1890s but appears to be of 1850s design. It would have been an old design by then and its performance would not have been up to the current lenses which used Jena glass. So why I wonder was such a lens manufactured so much later on. The 40 year production cycle is impressive but somewhat odd.

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[romanus53]

Sorry if I had shown this here before but the French camera for fighters reminds me to this one: gyroscopic gunsight recorder

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the cables and plug are of course not original but I wanted to try it out after I fixed the mechanics. Finally I sold it to someone restoring a Mosquito cockpit where it belongs.

Edited December 28, 2022 by romanus53

[wlaidlaw]

1 hour ago, pgk said:

Another Grubb lens. This one dates probably from the 1890s but appears to be of 1850s design. It would have been an old design by then and its performance would not have been up to the current lenses which used Jena glass. So why I wonder was such a lens manufactured so much later on. The 40 year production cycle is impressive but somewhat odd.

Paul, Remind me how long the 50mm Summicron M has been in production, with versions IV and V only differing by the built in lens hood. I think it is 1979 to date which is 43 years, so nothing really odd about the Grubb lens longevity of production. Admittedly Leica now offers the Summicron in the APO version but at a very steep uplift in price. 

Wilson

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Hallo,

Look here: Interesting Leica gear

[pgk]

6 minutes ago, wlaidlaw said:

Paul, Remind me how long the 50mm Summicron M has been in production .....

Indeed, but the Summicron was 'fit for purpose' since its original design and still is. The Grubb Patent lens was a simple cemented doublet and by the 1880s there were numerous optical makers looking into the increasingly popoular and potetially lucrative photographic marke,t and many moved into it - Wray, Beck, Dollond, Swift - even if some then found it too hard and competitive and gave up. To illustrate how much effort needed to be put in, Wryy had a machine dedicated just to producing aperture diaphragm leaves. Lens designs were becoming more sophisticated with the mathematics behind them slowly becoming clearer. Against such a backdrop, producing a lens from a very old design seems a little odd, good as it had been in its day. I suspect that there is a lot more to it than meets the eye though. The history of commercial lens success is a difficult and complicate one no doubt.

[nitroplait]

16 hours ago, wlaidlaw said:

Paul, Remind me how long the 50mm Summicron M has been in production, with versions IV and V only differing by the built in lens hood. I think it is 1979 to date which is 43 years, so nothing really odd about the Grubb lens longevity of production. Admittedly Leica now offers the Summicron in the APO version but at a very steep uplift in price. 

Wilson

Apropos current lenses with long production runs.

The lovely Nikkor 28mm 2.8 AiS was introduced in 1981 and I just checked to confirm that it is still unchanged in the Nikon product catalogue. Quite an achievement.

Of course, If you look only at optical design, the Nikkor 50mm 1.8 design can probably be traced even further back, but with many different barrel and coating variations over the years.