Were Vivitar T4 lenses multicoated?

[chip j]

c. 1973. And also were Leica M lenses multicoated (c. 1967)?? Thanks

 

[wiltw]

Asahi was the first to publicly proclaim the use of multicoatings with their 55mm f/1.4 lens in 1971. Asahi apparently purchased the patents from a US company, and other camera manufacturers paid royalties to Asahi to also use multicoating.

 

[Ian Grant]

Asahi was the first to publicly proclaim the use of multicoatings with their 55mm f/1.4 lens in 1971. Asahi apparently purchased the patents from a US company, and other camera manufacturers paid royalties to Asahi to also use multicoating.

No Asahi Pentax worked in collaboration with Carl Zeiss, it was Zeiss technology behind their Super Multi Coating.

Note the word "Super" in terms of Multi Coating, many lenses already had 2 or more coatings I had a Rodenstock Sironar 150mm f5.6 made I think around 1968 and it looked Multi Coated. What Pentax were using was a new pinnacle in terms of optimised and balance coatings to virtually eliminate internal flare completely without affecting colour rendition. I've never noticed a difference in terms of results colour or B&W between my Super Takumar or Super Multi Coated (SMC) 50/55mm standard lenses, Where modern Multi coating made huge improvements was with zooms and wide angle lenses.

Hoya released a range of Multi Coated lens which had been poorly designed and not all internal air/glass surfaces were coated, some of the lenses suffered badly from flare, in the end the entire range disappeared, the company designed an entire new range of lenses but released them under their Tokina brand name.

The terms Single coating and also Multiple coating can be misleading, Zeiss Patented techniques for 2 coatings quite early on. Early Zeiss coatings give quite a blue colour cast so warm up filters were used to counter this, then coatings improved and lenses and coatings were optimised for Colour work, these lenses usually had more than one coating, so technically we could use the word "Multi" but the coatings were applied singly. Example would be the Color Skopar or the CZJ Pancolar which was the newer colour balanced coatings applied to the older "T" coated Flekton.

These days we tend to use the term Multi Coating to be the equivalent of Pentax Super Multi Coating, the early Vivitar T4 lenses and the 1967 Leica M lenses were not Multi Coated in that sense.

Ian

 

[chip j]

Danke

 

[dynachrome]

Asahi's f/1.4 standard lens was a 50, not a 55. The f/1.8 and f/2 standard lenses were 55s.