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DREW WILEY

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Mark. Symmetrical cemented triplets are among the most demanding of designs. Schneider subcontracted their last and best regular Dagor lenses to Kern Switzerland, and never made those themselves. I still shoot a 14 inch one of 80's vintage. But I don't know about the far more limited ULF Fine Art series afterwards.

Kern still makes various optics. Binoculars, gun scopes, I think; other specialty contracts. I didn't know about microscope optics.
 

Mark J

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I understand , Drew, but those Dagors were in the late 70's or early 80's, weren't they ? Were Kern making them before, and was it just a case of them having the tooling on-site ?
Bear in mind that Schneider happily made the cemented triplets in the Super Angulon f/5.6 models , plus the non-trivial doublets in the Symmar-S ( etc ). Unless Kern made those too ... ? ... but I'd be suprised.
 

Dan Fromm

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I understand , Drew, but those Dagors were in the late 70's or early 80's, weren't they ? Were Kern making them before, and was it just a case of them having the tooling on-site ?
Bear in mind that Schneider happily made the cemented triplets in the Super Angulon f/5.6 models , plus the non-trivial doublets in the Symmar-S ( etc ). Unless Kern made those too ... ? ... but I'd be suprised.

Schneider had a little experience with Dagor types. Early Symmars and G-Clarons.
 

DREW WILEY

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As I recall, Schneider bought the rights to Goerz, including Artars and Dagors, but then upgraded those with more modern coatings. Kern made the upgraded 10 inch and 14 inch versions, with the last of them, maybe late 80's, being the multicoated 14 inch one. It had the highest contrast and most hue saturation of ANY photographic lens I've ever seen. That makes sense - only four air/glass interfaces and superb coating. But the contrast was simply too much for the LF chrome work I was doing at the time, so I sold it and bought the previous single-coat version instead. The matching of the triplets was quite fussy and required the highly skilled labor of a single specialist person at Kern. These were really top end lenses, the apogee of Dagor design.

What doomed them, according to a face to face conversation with a Schneider Rep, was that plasmat G-Clarons were a lot easier to make, and higher performance lenses anyway, except in the contrast category - bigger image circles, better tangential performance, much better at closeups. But again, it comes back to "look" as well - there are subtle differences of edge rendition and microtonality which give Dagors their cult status and extreme used pricing, if a bit of mythology is added as well. I mostly shoot a Fujinon A in the 360mm category - it's the most versatile - but sometimes the 14 inch Dagor instead. Either works well on 8x10. I like the Fuji for its light weight in no.1 shutter as well as superb close-up performance (excellent at infinity too).
 
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abruzzi

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of course sometimes it may be worthwhile to buy a new lens:

IMG_0930.jpg
 

Ian Grant

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As I recall, Schneider bought the rights to Goerz, including Artars and Dagors, but then upgraded those with more modern coatings. Kern made the upgraded 10 inch and 14 inch versions, with the last of them, maybe late 80's, being the multicoated 14 inch one. It had the highest contrast and most hue saturation of ANY photographic lens I've ever seen. That makes sense - only four air/glass interfaces and superb coating. But the contrast was simply too much for the LF chrome work I was doing at the time, so I sold it and bought the previous single-coat version instead. The matching of the triplets was quite fussy and required the highly skilled labor of a single specialist person at Kern. These were really top end lenses, the apogee of Dagor design.

What doomed them, according to a face to face conversation with a Schneider Rep, was that plasmat G-Clarons were a lot easier to make, and higher performance lenses anyway, except in the contrast category - bigger image circles, better tangential performance, much better at closeups. But again, it comes back to "look" as well - there are subtle differences of edge rendition and microtonality which give Dagors their cult status and extreme used pricing, if a bit of mythology is added as well. I mostly shoot a Fujinon A in the 360mm category - it's the most versatile - but sometimes the 14 inch Dagor instead. Either works well on 8x10. I like the Fuji for its light weight in no.1 shutter as well as superb close-up performance (excellent at infinity too).

Both Schneider and Zeiss have rights to make Dagors, Schneider bought Goerz AM Opt, and of course C.P. Goerz, Berlin, became part of Zeiss, and Carl ZeissZeiss did make a few Dagors, and are now part of the Zeiss foundation.

Ian
 

DREW WILEY

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Well, the basic Goerz double-triple formula goes way back to the 1890's, and the Dagor brand name itself to 1904. There have been multiple brands in numerous focal lengths, but only a few relatively modern examples, and all those to my knowledge, under Schneider marketing rights. I don't personally have any experience with any of the antique ones.

Perhaps if abruzzi watered his little hypergon cactus more often, it might grow larger. It already has a sprinkler head installed.
 
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DREW WILEY

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One type of the G-Claron series was dagor-like. I think there was also an f/9 process tessar version similar to what Zeiss offered. I've only used the modern in-shutter plasmat G-Clarons.
 

abruzzi

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I've had a harder time finding Dagor G-Clarons. I have one in a 210, but most I come across are the later plasmat types. I don't have a shutter for the 210 yet to compate it to the plasmat 210 I have.
 
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