Wide Angles Both Old and New

[william linne]

I was shooting some test shots over the weekend for a new crop of lenses to put up for sale this week. I shot a bunch with a tiny little Gundlach 5x8 Wide Angle. I was shooting on 8x10, just to see what the coverage truly was. Well, you can see by the photo I'm including that it pretty much covers the whole film area. It's pretty sharp corner to corner (when using the waterhouse stop, this pic was shot wide open) and there was no falloff in illumination (except for the dark areas in the room on the right side of the photo). Yet the lens itself is about an inch and half long and 2 inches wide and weighs about 6 ounces. Why is it so common to find antique lenses that have tremendous amounts of yet are tiny? All my modern wide angels are HUGE? Just wondering.

[phaedrus]

Why is it so common to find antique lenses that have tremendous amounts of coverage yet are tiny?

Both of which couldn't be said of the subject matter ;-)
No, seriously, I think it has to do with the fact that older lenses are not as fast, e.g. the Super Angulon 90 mm used to start at f/8, now it's either f/6.3 or f/5.6. Though this isn't a good example because the image circle of the latter is the largest of the three. It may be a design decision physical size vs. image circle.
Christoph