15" Tele-Raptar design?

**mdarnton** · 13-Dec-2014, 09:11

I wonder if anyone knows anything definite about the 15" Tele-Raptar's optical design. I recently bought a shuttered one, and cleaning it up I noticed that the front was a positive element/s, so I tried using it alone. It's about 190mm or so that way, and the results were interesting enough that I'm going to continue to explore it:

Spinner
by michael.darnton, on Flickr

Now I'm wondering what's there in the way of glass. It almost looks like just a single front and single back element, which I am pretty sure can't be the case. There's just about no mention at all of this lens on the web. . .

**MDR** · 13-Dec-2014, 09:23

It's a 4 element Tele design the Wollensak catalogue features schematics of the lens construction
http://cameraeccentric.com/html/info/wollensak_14.html

Nice result btw.

**Bill_1856** · 13-Dec-2014, 09:23

Interesting question.

**mdarnton** · 13-Dec-2014, 10:13

MDR, thanks.

That was about one stop down. Full wide was mostly blur and glow, farther down, it gets progressively sharper. Probably somewhere in there is the sweet spot.... It seemed like a lot of both the glow and the sharpness I saw on the ground glass disappeared on film, leaving me something sort of out of focus everywhere.

.......looking closer, I see that the focus point moved back quite a bit, on the film.