Enlarging lenses, 35mm and 6x6 cms

[Martin Rickards]

Browsing the net, I found this French site https://www.dropbox.com/s/sirbxlw0fv22d14/Objetivos de ampliadora.pdf?dl=0 with comparative ratings of Angenieux, Leitz, Meopta, Nikor, Rodenstock and Schneider lenses. Who'd have thought the lenses that got top marks? (It wasn't the Angenieux)

 

[mdarnton]

I have seen similar claims for the Meogon, previously. The Nikkor result surprises me--I had both lenses and the f/4 was easily inferior, as it should be.

For the last few years I have been testing enlarging lenses for 1:2 film duping, and it's interesting how differently they perform. One of the surprises was contrast differences among equally-clean lenses--something we never think about for the darkroom. The other thing I learned was the quality bump from just moving up a jump in focal length, in order to use just the center of the field--something I guess all of us already knew from enlarging.

 

[Martin Rickards]

I'd hazard a guess that the quality or otherwise of a lens is far less objective than bald test results can tell and that most would have produced more than satisfactory enlargements.

 

[Paul Howell]

Berry Thornton in the Edge of Darkness, tested a range of lens and found that Meogon's to be as good as other top end lens. Of the lens he tested all seemed to be very good stopped down to 5.6 or F8. His test was not a bench test, he printed all using the same negative, same contrast, same paper and did a blind viewing. I bought an Otpeums that came with a Meogan, nice lens. As I only had one lens board and wanted to print 50 and 6X6 I had the board drilled to fit a 50mm and 75 Wollensak, the 50mm Wollensak is as good as the Meogan. On the other hand I have another copy of the 50mm Wollensak, same 4 element design, but not anywhere as good the other 50mm.