Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/05/16
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 03:06 AM 5/17/98 +0000, Richard Urmonas wrote: >What about the Industar lenses. These appear to be used on a fair number of the Leica copies from >that part of the world. Anyone have experiance with these? I find the Industar lenses for the FED quite confusing, which amuses the great expert on these guys, Oscar Fricke, most mightily, as HE thinks they are a simple and straightforward series. Most of the Industar lenses are Russian and emenate from the great KMZ works outside of Moscow, home to most of the production machinery looted from the Carl Zeiss works at Jena after the War (some went to the LOMO works in St Petersburg, while all of the camera production machinery went to the Arsenal works in Kiev.) A few of the Industar lenses were or are made at the FED plant at Karkhov (named, as noted by another esteemed LUG'er, for the founder of the NKVD) in the Ukraine. The Industar-22 was a 3.5/50 lens produced from 1948 to 1953; it was replaced by the Industar-50 in 1953, and this remained in production until 1971. Both were produced in rigid and collapsible versions. The 2.8/50 Industar-50 was tweaked a bit at the FED works to produce the Industar-26, made from 1955 until 1963; the use of Lanthanum glass changed this to the Industar-61L, produced from 1961 to the present. All are Tessar clones similar in performance to the Elmar. These are rather pleasant lenses and, no, there is supposed to be no radioactivity from the I-61L! Marc msmall@roanoke.infi.net FAX: +540/343-7315 Cha robh bas fir gun ghras fir!