NB: This is a draft (incomplete) article. If you have any in-depth information, or original manufacturer manuals, catalogues or period advertisements that might be relevant, please email Mark here. Peer review and contributors welcome, and will be credited. Similarly, if you have any memorable images shot with these lenses, we’re happy to show them in …
NB: This is a draft article with a number of omissions and content to be added. If you have any in-depth information, or original manufacturer manuals, catalogues or period advertisements that might be relevant, please email Mark here. Peer review and contributors welcome, and will be credited. Similarly, if you have any memorable images shot …
A quartet of German powerhouses stands tall among car manufacturers: Audi, BMW, Mercedes and Porsche. Among lens makers, Leica, Rodenstock, Schneider and Zeiss have similar stature – but perhaps Leica above all embodies the purest ideals of Teutonic modernism most diligently executed – and valued accordingly by the market. However, only relatively recently have Leica …
Dust long having settled on the carcass of the industry, it seems in hindsight that Leica treated the production of domestic slide projectors more seriously than the Zeiss / Zett / Voigtlander combine. Leica’s catalogue of projector lenses represents the acme of the craft, matched by none for breadth and few for depth: for image …
The Bender Optical Works in Strawberry House, Leazes Park (Newcastle Upon Tyne) is noted in the 1960 edition of ‘The Instrument Manual’* as the operating premises of the company formerly known as M. Bender (Northern) Ltd – makers of analytical instruments. Several 1963 catalogues show B.O.W (Bender Optical Works Ltd) as the manufacturer of at …
Přerov, in the former Czech Republic, has been the production base of Meopta since 1933, when it was founded by Alois Mazurek, an enterprising professor at a local industrial school. Prior to nationalisation and re-branding in 1946 the company was known as Optikotechna Přerov. It is testimony to their build quality that a surprising number …
Colour and Collaboration The Agfa story begins in 1867 in Rummelsburger See, on the outskirts of Berlin, when chemists Paul Mendelssohn Bartoldy and Carl Alexander von Martius founded the Gesellschaft Für Anilin-Fabrikation mbH. For the next 120 years, this expertise cast the die for Agfa’s successes and failures: aniline is a base ingredient in dyes, …
The family tree planted by Bausch & Lomb in 1874?, that bifurcated and recombined across over a century of American optics production, has been well documented elsewhere (notably Rudolf Kingslake and Dan Fromm, but it is worth preçis here, with added information relevant to the identification and dating of enlarger, projector and industrial lenses. However, …
Frequently, confusion. As if we didn’t have enough trouble cataloguing lenses with names like Bender, Nooky and Veginar, (thanks Lumaplak, Leica and Boots), Delta-world is far from the semantic ideal of one name for one thing. Major changes to a lens design sometimes go unflagged, while other, outwardly dissimilar lenses are optically identical. In many …