75mm F/1.9 OSCILLO-ANASTIGMAT No C47616 WOLLENSAK-DUMONT

[venchka]

A member of the Texas Photo Forum was asking about this lens:

75mm F/1.9 OSCILLO-ANASTIGMAT No C47616 WOLLENSAK-DUMONT

Does anyone know anything about it? Image quality? Usefulness on another camera? The camera it came from was Polaroid based.

Thanks!

[Dan Fromm]

Useless for most purposes. The shutter, if it has more than one speed, may be useful for front-mounting lenses in barrel or even a pinhole. And I suppose it can be used to take really funky macro shots. Its designed to photograph traces on an oscilloscope's cathode ray tube. May be designed to image a curved field (the inside of the front of the tube) on a plane (the film), that claim's been made. In general, a paperweight. I hope member of the TPF didn't pay much for it.

[Nathan Potter]

I'll second Dans' comment. I've actually used this lens attached to the standard oscilloscope camera but backed in toward the film plane for subject distances of about 3 to 6 feet. Amazingly poor performance with Polaroid Type 52 film. I did co-worker mug shots for the fun of it.

Nate Potter

[IanG]

I have an f1.9 75mm Dallmeyer Oscilloscope lens, it's great as a loupe but not much else, the shutter's a Press Prontor, and excellent at all speeds.

These lenses usually have extremely poor coverage at infinity not much more than 35mm, perhaps just enough for a 645, and as Dan says they are computed for macro work, they wouldn't need to have particularly good definition or correction after all the CRT tubes used at the time the lenses were made were quite low resolution.

Ian

[Void]

Has some of You did use it for macro, especially 4:1? What was the result?

[IanG]

I tried mine on one of my 5x4's to check the image circle, it doesn't stop down very much at all, f8 I think (I don't have it with me), it wasn't practical to mount it on bellows for 35mm use. So I didn't try it as a macro lens because I'm sure the quality won't be very good.

Ian

[venchka]

Thanks everyone! I think he paid a $1 for the whole camera.

[Hollis]

I have one too and realized that normally, it would be a worthless lens but jsut tonight, I took the rear element off and sure as shit, it covers 4x5. I haven't shot anything yet with it and don't even know the focal length - I would say around 150-180mm.

[venchka]

There you go. Everything has value to someone.

[Hollis]

Here is a quick polaroid scan...