Tele-Arton 5.6/250 - surprisingly good! :)

eumenius said:

Hello friends,

yesterday I've tightened my belt and finally bought a beautiful Tele-Arton 250/5.6, Linhof selected. $250, glass flawless, the plastic handle on release lever is lost (usual issue with Compurs). Well, I tried the lens on infinity - no movements on 4*5, almost. But I wanted it for the portraits, and that's where the lens really shines - it's very easy to focus (on great SatinSnow glass, of course), and there's a full sharpness beginning from the full aperture! But the most nice thing about this lens is a good crisp sharpness together with an unusually long tonal range of resulting negatives - it's not a lack of contrast, it's an excellent plus rendition of skin tones. My Fujinon-W 210/5.6 works way much harsher. The only lens I have I can compare with this Tele-Arton - an old barrel-mounted Trioplan 210/3.5, but it's not as sharp as the relatively modern T-A (not as if I needed that from Trioplan, though ). So it looks that I've got a perfect portrait lens for my LF work - with exactly the characteristics I wanted And it's in Compur 1, a very convenient feature. And the bellows draw on my Toyo-View 45D allows me to choose whatever scale of portrait I want, no limits in reasonable boundaries

Thanks to everybody whom I eventually misled with the lens type in my previous post, and who gave me their opinion on T-As - I've had a chance already to see 240/5.5 Tele-Arton, and it's just incomparable with my lens I would scan the prints tomorrow, and post them in my gallery - just to show how everything works

Cheers,
Zhenya

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