Brand consistency throughout lens lineup?

[David R Munson]

Preface: right now I'm shooting with two Schneider lenses, a 135mm Symmar-S and a 210mm Symmar•EX. I'm looking to add a 300mm lens and something wider as well, probably a 90mm.

I'd like to maintain the Schneider brand when I add lenses, but I wonder if there's really any actual, practical value in brand consistency. Like, if I get a Rodenstock or Nikon 300mm f/5.6, in practice how much would either of them actually differ from a Schneider? I'm guessing next to no difference in practical terms, but there's also a lot about optics I don't know.

Glass gurus? What say ye?

[Shootar401]

I have a Rodenstock 210, Fuji 150, a Nikkor 90 and 65 and a Eastman 7.5" All are optically identical from what I can tell. Now I would NEVER use a 3rd party lens on my Nikon 35mm's. But with LF pretty much all things are equal.

[Frank Petronio]

Back in the day when people had to shoot chromes against grey backgrounds with Kodak EPR or something finicky like that, you would test your film and often have to add a very subtle Wratten gel filter to neutralize the color... perhaps having the same brand, age, and design series of lenses helped you to be more consistent with filtration and overall look of the film. But there was also more sample variation between lenses back then too, so you could consider the whole idea moot.

Still, given the choice, I'll wait for or pay a few bucks more just to keep everything "tidy" for my mental health. But it really doesn't matter.

It is nice to use the same type of shutter so you get in the habit of operating it efficiently but still, it isn't that taxing to switch.

[Fotoguy20d]

I doubt there's much difference between Nikkor, Fujinon, Schneider and Rodenstock but I like to stick with all the same brand (Nikkor in my case). At least with the 75/4.5, 90/8 and 210/5.6, they all use the same filter size, which is convenient. My 135/5.6 is a Schneider but someday it too will be a Nikkor (and probably a 150/5.6)

Dan

[Kirk Gittings]

Back in the day when people had to shoot chromes against grey backgrounds with Kodak EPR or something finicky like that, you would test your film and often have to add a very subtle Wratten gel filter to neutralize the color... perhaps having the same brand, age, and design series of lenses helped you to be more consistent with filtration and overall look of the film. But there was also more sample variation between lenses back then too, so you could consider the whole idea moot.

Still, given the choice, I'll wait for or pay a few bucks more just to keep everything "tidy" for my mental health. But it really doesn't matter.

It is nice to use the same type of shutter so you get in the habit of operating it efficiently but still, it isn't that taxing to switch.

In the days of film for commercial work it was a test of your metal to get a matched set of chromes from different lenses. This was true of architecture and interiors too. Now its much easier to do do the matching in PS.

[Jody_S]

If I were to start over I would probably have some loyalty to Fuji, but it would be strictly a quality/price thing and not a poor opinion of the other players' lenses. As it is, of course, I don't own a single one.

[Vaughn]

I have a friend who said, "I want to stick with German glass, not any Japanese." I thought..."Whatever floats your boat."

If I was concerned about such things, I'd be more likely to stick to the same brand shutter, such as Copal...just to make that part of the operation consistent. As it is I have a Caltar, Fujis, RD Artars, Raptars, Computars, Rodenstock, etc in all sorts of shutters or barrels. They all do the job. I'll save the obsessing for image and print quality.

I have a Gowland (4x5), Zone VI (8x10), and a couple old Eastman Kodak cameras (5x7 and 11x14).

My tool chest is an odd collection of adjustable spanners, screwdrivers, etc, too.

And even though I have triplet boys, they are all very different, too.

[Heroique]

Me, I owned two Schneiders (110, 150) – then purchased a Fuji (240).

This was not easy, and I expected the worse.

But I got through it, and now I don’t notice.

[Oren Grad]

Rendering of out-of-focus areas differs across brands (e.g. Rodenstock vs Schneider vs Fuji vs Nikon) and often across lens types (e.g. normal plasmats vs wide angles) and generations within a brand and type (e.g. Rodenstock Sironar vs Sironar-N). It's up to you to decide, based on the kinds of pictures you take and on your own perception and esthetic preferences, whether that matters.

[Peter Gomena]

As others have said, in the old days of shooting chromes on tabletop subjects, there could be a subtle difference between lenses that took a little filtration to equalize if absolute consistency was required.

I find lens types within a brand to produce as different an effect as mixing brands. All my lenses are Schneiders made between 1972 and about 1992. Of all the lenses, a mixture of plasmats and wide-angles. The 305 G-Claron stands out as producing an image with an almost biting sharpness, noticeably different than all the others, which produce a smoother image. I see very little color difference between all of them, probably due as much to consistency in the coatings as anything else.

Peter Gomena