[Leica] Bessa

[Jim at hemenway.com (Jim Hemenway)]

Marc:

Thanks for the info.

Jim

Marc James Small wrote:

> 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!
> 
> 
> 
> 
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