I have a Carl Zeiss Jena Dagor 240/9, and it indeed has formidable coverage. It will cover 7x17 without a doubt, and is not mush in the corners. I know Kerik uses his on his 14x17, and it just has a tiny bit of the corners of the image area that are not covered. I think as long as you are stopped down to a reasonable f/32, it will be certainly sharp enough for contact printing. This is in contrast to the older Schneider Angulon 210 that I had a few years back that would illuminate the entire 7x17 negative, but would never really get sharp in the corners, no matter how much you stopped it down.

Quote Originally Posted by Dan Fromm View Post
John, the ebay listing smells of a hyperventilating liar in OZ who's sold under other screen names, including pak harry 1944 and cameo need ham. In this case, although the vendor is hyperventilating it isn't lying.

According to the VM, "Wide Angle Dagor f9.0 This was a later lens and was listed in 1924 in 75mm for 4.25x3.25in, 100mm for 6.5x4.75in, 125mm for 8.5x6.5in, 150mm for 9x7in, 180mm for 10x8in, 210mm for 12x10in, 240mm for 15x12in all for stopped down use (Goe014) This lens can cover at least 100°, and 150mm is actually useful on 10x8in when stopped right down. (There is a patent for an f9 wide angle anastigmat of this type to Goerz (Brit Pat. 209,093 of 1922), using a low R.I. meniscus with a high R.I. flint for the biconcave and baryta flint for the external biconvex lens. The design was aimed at reducing astigmatism at wide angles.)"

The lens on offer's trade name "Weitwinkel - Dagor" contains the text string "Dagor" and it is in the Dagor design family, but it is in no way an f/6.8 or f/7.7 Dagor with restricted maximum aperture. The lesson here is that design family is no guarantee of performance. For more on this idea, compare claimed coverage for these two very similar lenses: Cooke Ser. VIIb and Wide Field Ektar.

For curiosity I did the arithmetic, and found that a 240 mm lens that covers 100 degrees will cover a 572 mm circle at infinity. The formats given in the listing (8x10, 11x14, 7x17, 8x20) all fit in that circle. So if the lens on offer actually covers 100 degrees, as reported in the VM, it will cover those formats.

I'm not sure that f/9 WA Dagors really cover 100 degrees. This because coverage is an elastic concept whose meaning in manufacturers' propaganda has changed over time. Modern Schneider and Rodenstock catalogs, for example, use much more stringent criteria for coverage than seems to have been used in between-the-wars catalogs.

All that said, f/9 Dagors have their partisans and their high prices seem to be justified. Nearly $US 1400 seems like a lot to me, but there may be people who are willing to pay at least that much for the lens on offer. If it gets a bid, the bidder must value it at least that highly.

Cheers,

Dan