Which of my 5 LF lenses are worth keeping or worth upgrading?

[Bernice Loui]

Higher contrast or overall "higher" lens performance?

Don't be fooled by lenses with higher contrast -vs- actual higher optical performance. There are a HUGE number of other factors (film flatness, camera alignment, lighting, film type, film exposure and...) far beyond optical performance of any lens affecting the perception print quality. Resolution is just one of many, many, many other more important aspect of any expressive print.

Of this collection of modern lenses from 90mm to 125mm (90mm f4.5 Grandagon, 105mm f8 swd Fujinon, 110mm f5.6 schneider SSXL, 115mm f6.8 Grandagon, 120mm f8 Super Angulon, 125mm f8 swd Fujinon), none of them are clearly better than one or another, they ALL have pluses and negatives. All are absolutely capable of creating extraordinary quality prints.


Film exposure aperture will become another factor given the projection enlargements of prints. View camera lens performance tends to start out ok or more than acceptable at full aperture then reach peak lens performance at some range of lens apertures then falling off as the lens aperture grows smaller due to diffraction. Keep in mind, stopping the lens aperture down to gain the perception of what is in focus is just that "perception of what is in focus", as they are not on the actual plane of focus and could never be in true focus. Exception being when all objects imaged by the lens is at true infinity focus.

Point being, focus on expressive print making and lessen much the obsession over fantasy of "THE" lens.

If you're making projection enlargement prints up to 40"x50" or 10X from a 4x5 sheet of film, seriously consider going up in film format size as that can make more difference in print quality overall than the fantasy uber best lens. But, know there is a limit to going up film format size as larger film alone is not automatically better as there area host of problems gained with going up in film format size.

Know what Fotographers often so myopically focus on can be of zero value to their intended audience, projection of values that their audience might place little of any value on.


Bernice

That said, I was considering the 120mm Super Symmar HM f/5.6 or the 110mm Super Symmar XL f/5.6 (both of which can be used with the Shen Hao 6x17 roll film extension back) to replace my 90mm Sinar Sinaron W and the 240mm Fujinon A F/9 to replace my 210mm Schneider Symmar-S. If there are better options, I'd love to hear them. If it helps with any suggestions, I shoot almost exclusively with color transparency and color negative and print up to 50"x60".

Any advice from you experienced shooters would be much appreciated.