Should look up the price these go for nowadays Fred 😵💫
Fred Miranda wrote:
I was not aware that Voigtlander produced a 150mm (15cm) f/4.5 APO-Lanthar. It's a legendary large-format lens based on an asymmetric 5-element Heliar optical design, produced in the 1950s using high-refractive lanthanum glass.
Tronnier or Oehme -which side are you on in this long-cycle battle for lens design supremacy - high performance wide open or character wide open?
'By the early 1950s, Albrecht Wilhelm Tronnier had already shown what he could do to a soft lens. He'd tightened up the Color-Skopar until it behaved at full aperture, the way a modern lens is supposed to. He wanted to do the same thing to the Heliar — Voigtländer's five-element design since 1900, prized for decades precisely because it didn't fully correct itself wide open.
He wasn't allowed to. According to Voigtländer's own documented history, Tronnier wanted to improve the Heliar's performance at full aperture the same way he had with the Skopar, but was stopped by Voigtländer director Adolf Oehme, who insisted on keeping the commercially valuable soft rendering at wide apertures — a look that was really just uncorrected coma and astigmatism. The improved design he built anyway wasn't allowed to carry the Heliar name. Multiple German references on the lens agree on why: for marketing reasons, it did not appear under the Heliar name, because the company didn't want to put the Heliar's reputation for that soft, glowing rendering at risk.
So the better lens became a different product. It emerged in 1952 as the Apo-Lanthar, using lanthanum glass with an unusually high refractive index and low dispersion, and it's generally credited as the first lens design corrected apochromatically — across all three primary colors rather than the usual two. A separate line of Apo-Lanthar optics followed for Voigtländer's medium and large format cameras from 1954 into the early 1970s, spanning four focal lengths from 105mm to 300mm, each one patented by Tronnier himself.'
(note the bias. Some things never change - design purist vs appreciation of tasteful imagery. and we see today who won at Cosina - thus far at least)
