Originally Posted by
paulbarden
Thanks, glad you like it.
As regards the Industar37; my understanding is that there is quite a bit of variability among them in terms of quality. I don’t know how true this is, but I’ve had one person tell me they acquired one and found it was rubbish. I had no intentions of getting one of these but a friend said to me recently that he’d decided he wasn’t going to proceed with his plans to build a camera for it and offered it to me, so I accepted his offer.
I’ve done no side by side comparisons with any of my other lenses - I suppose I could compare it with my 10” Kodak Anastigmat and my 12” Kodak Ektar f4.5 and see how they relate. I gather that the Industar is a Tessar in design. It is a coated lens (appears to have coatings on the front and rear of the front group), but it still exhibits some flare without shading the lens under flare-inducing conditions,so you’ll need to pay attention to that. I can’t tell you exactly what it’s image circle is, but it more than covers 8x10 at infinity. My Industar has about fifteen aperture blades which makes for very clean bokeh I expect (haven’t used it to test that yet), so in all, I am pleasantly surprised by its performance. You could do far worse in seeking out a “normal” lens for 8x10. Be aware, of course, this is a barrel lens (no shutter) so for some folks this presents a usability problem.
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