- Joined
- Jul 14, 2011
- Messages
- 13,926
- Format
- 8x10 Format
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.
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).
Schneider had a little experience with Dagor types. Early Symmars and G-Clarons.
Oh, and weren't the early G-Clarons a Dagor construction ?
Perhaps if abruzzi watered his little hypergon cactus more often, it might grow larger. It already has a sprinkler head installed.
Oh, and weren't the early G-Clarons a Dagor construction ?
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