[Leica] Bessa

[msmall at aya.yale.edu (Marc James Small)]

At 03:22 PM 8/4/06 -0400, you wrote:
>Thanks, I want to try it again in color.

The Bessa is a remarkable capable camera.  On my 12th birthday, in 1962, my
parents gifted me one, my first camera.  I beat the hell out of that puppy
but it still works well today.  That camera was built in 1932, and I have
owned it for well more than half its life.  

The Vaskar and Voigtar lenses (Voigtar is the Prewar name, Vaskar the
Postwar, though they seem to be of identical design) are very capable
three-element lenses and were hawked to Zeiss Ikon, on whose cameras they
appear as Novars and Dominars and the like, though Rodenstock and Steinheil
and others also supplied such.  The Skopar was a four-element Tessar design
of great ability, as well.  The prize of the bunch is the Heliar, a lens
which started out as a great lens and only got better over time.  Zeiss
ended up buying Voigtl?nder from Schering in the 1950's, when the
pharmaceutical industry was in a financial downspin, mainly to get control
of their lens design guys, and they held onto these guys when they sold
Voigtl?nder out of the wreck of Zeiss-Ikon-Voigtl?nder to Rollei
Fototechnik in 1973.  (The current permutation of Rollei, Franke &
Heidecke, still owns the heart of Voigtl?nder, though they lost the brand
names during their bankruptcy.)

And to respond to a comment on this thread made earlier today, I do not
recall that Leitz ever made a three-element 9cm or 90mm lens until the
recomputed Elmar of 1964.  Other than that lens, I believe that all Elmars
are four-element-in-three-group designs tweaked by Berek from the original
Rudolph Tessar design of 1902.

Marc

msmall@aya.yale.edu 
Cha robh b?s fir gun ghr?s fir!