Courtesy of B.S.Kumar, I now have, in my stable, a seemingly singular soft focus lens; a Komuranon-SF Soft Focus 300mm f/5.6 Lens on a copal 3s shutter. I had thought, being retired, that my years of gas had resolved; but no!
The lens was estimated to be similar to the Heliar effect. Nevertheless I thought I should compare it to other lens I had access to.
We frequently get requests for examples of the sharpest lens and less frequently get requests for the look of soft focus lenses. We have a number of fine threads of images of soft focus lenses but thy may suffer a bit from having different subjects, different exposures, different lighting and different development and printing.
So here is a completely boring set of images of the same subject, same lighting, same fstop (as far as possible) and same development and printing.
The computer screen sharpens the image compared to the print which I did nothing about. Digitalizing the prints changes the colour tones, which I desaturated back to a degree.
The first set of three images are ranked in softness; most to less - the Imagon 300mm H5.6, the Kodak Portrait 305mm F5.6, and the Komuranon 300mm at F5.6. Much softer than a Heliar the Komuranon threw a distinct halo of light bleeding into dark; not as wide an area as the Kodak or the Imagon, but the soft and sharp character of the Imagon was slightly prominent. So I ranked them all as similar.
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