Re: Enlarger lens question

[henningw@portal.ca (Henning J. Wulff)]

Joe Berenbaum wrote:

>I'm going to do some printing again at some point (black and white and
>Ilfochrome), and will need a good 50mm enlarger lens to put on my old
>Omega enlarger. I now also have a Bowens Illumitran with contrast
>control unit with which I want to copy slides. This also will need a
>good quality enlarger lens of 50-60mm focal length (and ideally an
>aperture of f2.8 for easier focusing and framing). I thought first of a
>Rodagon or Componon but I'm just wondering about the Leitz/Leica lens
>options. I also wonder whether my Leica slides would be better- more
>faithfully- copied by a Leica enlarger lens rather than a Schneider or
>Rodenstock lens. Any opinions on Leica enlarger lenses versus the
>competition for my intended applications?

I haven't tried a lot of enlarger lenses lately, so I'm sure there's a lot
of good stuff out there, but I've used all of Leitz' and some others, so
here are my $.028CDN worth, and convert it to your currency at your peril.

I inherited a Focomat Ic with Focotar, all about 1958 vintage, about three
years later. A fine setup which I still use for all 35mm work. Later, when
the Focotar-2 , and the 40mm/2.8 Focotars came out, I tried them. I also
tried most of Nikon's, Schneider's, and Rodenstock's offerings of the time.
I also tried the 60mm Focotar and the 100mm V-Elmar (not on the Focomat,
naturally). I was considering getting the 60 and 100 Leitz lenses for my
4x5 enlarger, but in the end the sale fell through. The lens I went back to
is the old Focotar 50/4.5. This lens is slow; on the other hand it provides
for even exposures at wider apertures than any 2.8 lens I tried. The old
Focotar actually is a throttled f/2.8 or so, and does not vignette wide
open at medium enlargements. The newer 50mm Focotar-2 needed to be stopped
down 1 to 1-1/2 stops more to get cos*4th limited illumination, and it was
not as good regarding sharpness and contrast either, over the full field.
Forget the 40, or anybodies 40. You pay a lot for lens that took special
effort to design to make it work at all, but the quality is not there in
comparison to the better 50's or greater. The f/2.8 lenses from other
manufacturers were not as good either, with the Apo-Rodagon being
particularly disappointing, as I had had high hopes for an 'apo' lens. This
lens was not apochromatic, as far as I could tell. Also, all the f/2.8
lenses had to be stopped down to f/4.5 or more for even illumination. So
the old Focotar was best for me. This is all based on B&W, as that is all I
do in the dark with 35mm. Maybe I just got an exceptionally good old
Focotar (I have not tried other samples of this lens). In any case, I have
not tried any other enlarging lenses in the last 15 years.

For slide copying the best, in my opinion would be the El-Nikkor 105 apo,
if you can find and afford it. None of the above mentioned enlarging
lenses, other than the V-Elmar (which is just as scarce as the Nikon) come
even remotely close. There are various Micro lenses (and I don't mean
Nikon's pseudo micro) which make great slide duping lenses; Olympus makes
an 80, and Zeiss, Leitz, Nikon, Minolta and Canon also make or made lenses
that were optimized for 35mm and for 1:1. They are not cheap, but not
really expensive either. Finding them is the biggest problem.


   *
  /|\     Henning J. Wulff
 /###\      Architecture
 |[ ]|   henningw@portal.ca