I've read quite a few times the assertion that lenses labelled "Linhof" or "Sinar" were better than the regular versions, since they had been specially selected by the respective companies and represented the cream of the crop. I recently bought the Schneider production list books that Hartmut Thiele has put together and the data in them tells a different story.
The first thing to note is that lenses weren't being produced in a steady stream like cars, they were assembled in batches with weeks and sometimes months between batches of the same lens. The records show who the lenses were sold to; so a Technika-Symmar is shown separately to a Sinar-Symmar and a regular Symmar even though they were all made on the same day. Sometimes the regular Symmars outnumber the Technika-Symmars, sometimes they don't. And sometimes the entire batch is sold to Linhof (or Sinar) with nothing being produced for sale by Schneider. Even in the mixed batches it might be 50 for Schneider, 25 for Sinar and 25 for Linhof - nice round numbers. I think that the proposition that Linhof (or Sinar) took the best lenses and the ones sold by Schneider were not quite up to that standard is completely incorrect.
Two possibilities spring to mind. One is that Linhof set a standard which all Schneider lenses met, regardless of how they were badged. The other is that Linhof simply decided that Schneider knew what they were doing and just took what they were given. The first scenario would allow the company to state that all Linhof lenses were selected to met their own exacting standards. It might imply that lenses without the Linhof branding don't meet that criteria but it certainly wouldn't say that. It would however give the buyer a reason to pay more for the Linhof version. Basically it would be a marketing ploy.
To be honest, the idea that the QC at Schneider (or Rodenstock) would vary enough that there would be significant numbers of "better" or "worse" lenses seems far-fetched. I'm not saying the odd mistake wouldn't happen, but I seriously doubt that one of the premier lens manufacturers of the sixties would be anything other than utterly exacting with their top of the range lenses.
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