Hody Mokes Batman. $1825 for a 1910 lens. Mercy!

I kinda think the big reason lens designs like planars and plasmats are the rule today are beyond performance ( which is, of course, wonderful ) but ease of manufacture.

Fewer cells to center and cement than old classics ( sonnars, dagors ) and suitability to computer guided milling machines to make drop-in mounts.

Wisners Convertible Sets should give an idea how much it costs to makes lenses: a good old design ( plasmats... better known today as symmars, for schneider only copied the best ) made in low numbers.

The problem in looking for bargains is that the same cost of mortgage, health care, money, food, shelter... all that stuff is high. Any one amongst us whose livliehood depends upon on photography understands the difficulty of making enough money to live next door to one of his clients !

A craftsman, ( be it a photographer, camera maker, or lens maker ) has a harder time today than ever since so few people actually make anything anymore. And the awareness of the true cost of Work has been generally lost amongst us. Cheapness is everything.

( I guess this is becoming a rant... I'll be quick ) The eagerness with which we buy bargain chinese cameras rather than a Wisner, Canham, or Gandolfi ( fine cameras made by people tied to our own economy ) is apalling. Yeah, we're all poor / broke / starving / paying a mortgage / student loans / feeding kids yet we whine every day about the decline of Analog tools and materials. We don't have much say over Kodak, because we don't have enough money between us to make a dent in theireconomic needs. But we are the bloody marketplace for Ron Wisner.

OK, end rant.

That Protar V ( 1912 price $73 ) converts to $1435.35 ( AIER calculator http://www.aier.org/cgi-aier/colcalculator.cgi ) in today's money. Still stiffish.

My 1910 18" Portrait Unar ( yeah, baby ) was about $350 when it was made. Today, that converts to just a bit under $7000.

The calculator doesn't take everything into consideration. That portrait lens exceeded the per capita income in the US by about 20%.

Corrected to today's money, it probably only exceeds the income of photographers !

.

I traced a similar case a while back: A J. Lancaster & son Patent Rectigraphic 12x10", which cost £24 in 1912. By sheer coincidence that is exactly what I paid for it in 2004: £24. Aplanat lenses disappeared off the map around 1930, and were replaced by the improved Anastigmats.

By yet another of these coincidences the Zeiss f:18 wide-angle Protar (Zeiss, I don't know about the B&L, Krauss, and other's Series V Protars) lost the market dominance it had had for a long time around the middle of the 1930's. Perhaps someone flooded the market with (cheaper) Angulons with almost the same coverage, larger aperture and better center sharpness?

There is certainly a lesson to be learned from Wisner's lensmaking adventures: A modern verision of an old design is likely to be at least as expensive as the original, in terms of "real money". Some designs will be a lot more expensive, q.v. the Hypergon. Simple old lenses aren't necessarily so simple - Cooke optics have proved that.

A complete set of 10 Zeiss Serie IV Doppelprotar, fl. of 15,19,23,25,30,35,43,50,60 and 70 cm, would have cost around 1000 Mark in 1910. The 270mm f:18 WA Protar cost 155 Mark (most anastigmats were around that price, aplanats were 1/2 to 1/4 of that). So that would be $ 10 000 for a Protar casket set? Count me out!

While I have spent a lot of money on LF equipment (all of it European by yet another coincidence), I have bought everything used. Some of it very used, some of it seems more like it's been "lovingly collected" rather than used. But all in all I doubt my total expenditure on LF has been as much as $ 10 000...

Well, maybe it has.

df cardwell said:

That Protar V ( 1912 price $73 ) converts to $1435.35 ( AIER calculator http://www.aier.org/cgi-aier/colcalculator.cgi ) in today's money. Still stiffish.

My 1910 18" Portrait Unar ( yeah, baby ) was about $350 when it was made. Today, that converts to just a bit under $7000.

The calculator doesn't take everything into consideration. That portrait lens exceeded the per capita income in the US by about 20%.

Corrected to today's money, it probably only exceeds the income of photographers !

.

Click to expand...

That makes me feel a lot better about paying 250 for my 1922 Home Portrait Graflex.

G'morning Ole ( and esteemed friends )

I have before me a Hugo Meyer casket set, 5 cells from 300 mm to 540 mm.

Each cell, despite some old literature, is a protar ( 4 element ) variation.

At a photo show, the seller was asking $350. The original old compund shutter was in a bag, and the kit was in an unsynched ilex.

Two guys were having an inverted bidding war, insulting each other and the seller. While they were fighting, I quietly slipped a cell from it's barrel, counted 4 elements, and promptly gave the seller $400.

I ran away as fast as I could go. It has proven to be a wonderful kit, every bit as fine as my protars.

As for the Protar V, having a lock on the market for 40 years isn't bad. Dr. Rudolph probably wondered why it took so long to surpass the V for practical photography !

I can't bring myself to argue about Angulons. My Juwel has an unctd 120 that never is removed ( the Juwel has a lovely 4x5 deardorff back that was lovingly shaved to fit ! ).

d

ineffablething said:

That makes me feel a lot better about paying 250 for my 1922 Home Portrait Graflex.

Click to expand...

Twenty years ago, that ( with a good lens ) was a 1000 dollar camera !

Or more.

I always find your posts entertaining DF. Keep them coming!

df cardwell said:

The eagerness with which we buy bargain chinese cameras rather than a Wisner, Canham, or Gandolfi ( fine cameras made by people tied to our own economy ) is apalling.

.

Click to expand...

Even in my short lifetime people were saying the same things about the homeland of Nikon, Canon, Toyo, and Ebony. I'm pretty sure Canada's economy is quickly becoming tied almost as much to Shen Hao's motherland as to Gandolfi's. Politically that may not be true, granted. The question is, does investment in such ecomonies encourage them to "come up" to North American standards are just encourage more cheap knock-offs? Already companies that moved production to China early on are now moving to other countries because labor prices have gone up too much. And I've only ever heard of SHen Hao's factory being referred to as a "shop." I doubt there are millions of Shen Haos rolling off production lines. Like it or not, we're in a global economy. It could be argued that we have been for centuries. In my grandparents' lifetime people in Europe were complaining about the low cost products from North American factories and their cheap labor pools.

I'm as protectionist as the next guy, but personally, I'd love to see a low cost lens factory churning out cheap LF lens of yore. Obviously all the patents would be expired and no one else seems to think it profitable.

The Cooke XVa and PS945 are both examples of reasonable hard working folk trying to re-supply a perceived wanted product for a fair profit. All of a sudden $1800 isn't quite as bad for a 10 1/2" lens that would cover 16X20 format with movements. Typically though something like this will hit ebay and folks who have 1 (or 2!!) will say heck it isn't really worth that much to me and you'll see them hitting Ebay with the resulting market correction back to $600 - $900. A series V is a simple lens to re-tool but personally my vote would be for the classic Cooke VIIb in some of the larger sizes.