Category: Lenses

EO:  Please tell us more about the technical details.

E:  I may be found in many focal lengths and variations. From those intended for carte de visite, through half-plate and full-plate sizes, all the way to mammoth formats, where our largest specimen serves: the No. 0, 635mm f/5. Few shall ever make use of it, and I suspect you will not encounter one with any ease. My earliest selves may be recognised by their golden brass and waterhouse slots. In time, an iris diaphragm and perhaps an elegant blackened finish are also planned. But who can say? Perhaps, in some distant future, we Hermagis shall be taken over by the Société d'Optique et de Mécanique de Haute Précision Berthiot and converted to blackened aluminium. The advantage of lightness over brass is obvious enough, yet the soul shall lose some of its lustre. Beautiful things are often heavy.

EO: How do you distinguish yourself from other artistic lenses? Why should one choose the Eidoscope in particular?

E: There is both a technical and an artistic aspect. Let us first satisfy those of a technical disposition. Compared with my predecessors, I excel in speed—an aperture of f5 is a value worthy of the modern age. Certainly, Mʳ Petzval remains unmatched, yet the price of his virtues was collected elsewhere.

My construction employs a pair of achromatic doublets which restrain chromatic aberration and undesirable colour fringing. At the same time, however, I leave ample room for spherical aberration to reveal its strengths. At full aperture, these qualities are most pronounced, while stopping down gradually diminishes their influence and renders the image sharp and precise. Furthermore, both the front and rear groups may be used independently thanks to the symmetrical Rapid Rectilinear design, granting the photographer several distinct configurations with differing focal lengths and rendering characteristics. It is therefore no exaggeration to say that within a single brass barrel I conceal several lenses, each with its own manner of expression for whatever need may arise.

We have also innovated the aperture scale. Instead of today's confusion of competing systems, we have adopted our own approach and seek to bring order to the matter. Following the maximum aperture marked f5 come values such as 6, 7, 10, 14 and 20, corresponding to the actual aperture values and requiring no calculation. For in the Eidoscope, the diaphragm serves not merely to regulate light and depth of field, but above all to control the intensity and character of the artistic effect. This système permits a far finer degree of control, transforming the experienced photographer into a conductor commanding an entire orchestra. I am quite certain this innovation shall find favour.

EO: Novel and progressive indeed! It remains only to win over the artists.

E:  My true strength lies not in technical design, but in the manner in which I transform the photographic scene and unite precision with intention. I sketch an image that retains its descriptive character whilst remaining mysterious and fleeting. Bright passages are soothed by a characteristic shimmer and transitions between light and shadow assume an allegorical, almost otherworldly quality. The result is a unique harmony of sharp lines, soft radiance and atmosphere. I am nature's pencil. What is drawn, however, depends entirely upon your imagination.

EO: Then once again the most important instrument is the creator himself. Let us hope that the future grants success to the Eidoscope. Time, after all, remains the finest sieve of quality. What shall your final words be?

E:  L'Eidoscope ne photographie pas, il dessine!—Eidoscope doesn't take images; it draws them!

EO: *A carafe of the finest wine appears upon the table.*  May the world continue to paint, whether with brush or glass.

B&L weren't about to miss that party. Together with their German BFF Zeiss, they rolled up their sleeves and in 1904 hammered out the Unar. But hold your horses. The story is more twisted than that.

The Unar design was originally calculated at Zeiss by Dr. Rudolph in 1899. It was a four-element anastigmat with no cemented groups, basically one lens more than your neighbor's Triplet. Unfortunately, the concept aged about as gracefully as mayonnaise in the sun and quickly fell behind the demands of its time. The original Unar (before it got the Portrait label and soft-focus option) convulsed in its death throes for a bit, until Zeiss buried it in 1902 with the brand-new Tessar. More precisely, Dr. Rudolph striked again.

• Tessar (from Greek τέσσερα, téssera = four) also has four elements, but the last two are cemented into a doublet. You don't need a PhD to see the family resemblance: one evolved from the other. Tessar simply turned out to be the more gifted child and Zeiss loved it more. Unar lost. Tessar became one of the cornerstones of photographic optics.

• And by the way, all those companies are still alive and kicking. Bausch & Lomb now makes contact lenses (still lenses! Just for eyes). Taylor Hobson makes metrology instruments, Cooke Optics spun off and builds high-end lenses (their shared history is a soap opera for another time - they're still flirting with soft-focus, see the Cooke PS645), and Zeiss is still busy sticking its fingers into everything.

• To be fair, Bausch & Lomb were experts at this not just with the Unar. Their Petzvals and other models from the same period suffered from similar issues, though less dramatically. If you ever find one with an intact aperture, there are only two explanations: you just won the lottery and you'd better not even look at that diaphragm the wrong way, or It's a modern restoration. Which was expensive. Extra expensive². So don't mess with it either.

To give credit where it's due, everything else about the lens is top-notch. This was B&L's showpiece, meant to go head-to-head with TTH, and it shows. The build quality is superb and both the aperture and soft-focus selectors move with a crisp little whoosh that's weirdly satisfying - like the signature "puff" of air you get on a Knuckler when you twist it. The aperture ring sits closer to the flange, while the diffuser scale, marked 1–4, is placed before the diaphragm. One is the sharpest setting, four is the dreamiest mess.

• And here's a fun detail for the 0.0042‰ of humanity who might care: the lens screws right onto a Hermagis Eidoscope No.1 flange. So if you're missing a flange and, by some cosmic coincidence, you've got a No.1 Eido lying around, congratulations! Jackpot!

The most striking foreign feature, though, is the set of control rods. Both selectors have unmistakable sliders with holes on each side. They were meant for attaching strings, so the photographer could adjust settings from behind the camera without stepping away from the ground glass. Genius in theory, but considering the aforementioned friction, you'd need Arnold Schwarzenegger to actually pull it off. Still, it looks amazing on the diagrams.

• The only other lenses with the same slider system were the Portrait Series A f4, B&L's Petzvals, and the high-speed Series B f2.2. As far as I know, that's it. You won't find this oddball setup anywhere else.

• The Portrait Unar series came in four sizes: 10", 12", 14¾", and 18", all at f4.5. The biggest one shows up only sporadically in official catalogues. Apart from the version discussed here, there was also a later redesign that ditched the perforated sliders and moved toward the more modern visual language of lenses like the Plastigmat with double-hatched control rings.

As for the actual image rendering, Portrait Unar behaves pretty much like other anastigmats of its league. At the lowest soft-focus setting and wide open, the lens gives you pleasantly sharp, portrait-friendly images with just the right amount of contrast. Stop down even a homeopathic amount and sharpness skyrockets. Thanks to its flat-field design, it renders groups beautifully too.

• Quick recap: flat-field lenses bend perspective less, so the image stays sharp and well-defined across the entire frame. This makes them excellent for group portraits and essential for technical work.

• Curved-field lenses, on the other hand, tend to prioritize the center, with sharpness dropping off dramatically toward the edges. Petzvals and old meniscus optics behave like this. It's perfect for characterful portraits or artistic shots where accurate reproduction of reality isn't exactly a priority.

However, misspellings were common—often transcribed by ear, all the more so across languages—and illegible entries were hardly a rarity.

And now, into the whirlpool of speculation. Broschi could very well have been a mangled Brogi—the Florentine capo di fotografia Giacomo Brogi, who, together with his son Carlo, ran the firm Edizioni Brogi Firenze, active until 1950. The year 1873 would fall neatly into Giacomo's most prolific artistic period. And as Horst Fuchs would say: "That's not all!" The company established studios throughout Italy and, alongside its massive photographic output, dealt in the purchase, resale, and distribution of cameras, lenses, and chemicals of various brands and national origins. Brogi also regularly participated in international photographic exhibitions, such as the Esposizione Nazionale di Milano in 1881 or the 1873 Vienna World's Fair, where Dallmeyer also exhibited. It's not therefore absurd to imagine him acquiring this lens there and then—or perhaps returning home from Vienna flushed with excitement and immediately placing an order via the internet telegraph. The date of sale (25 October) aligns suspiciously well with the exhibition's duration (1 May to 31 October). This entire theory may rest on water rather than stone—but the clues fit together rather nicely. The lens itself shows clear signs of having been thoroughly mounted and seriously worked. So perhaps I do, in fact, own Giacomo Brogi's lens!

• Not that it dropped from the sky—I had to roll up my sleeves and dive headfirst into the dusty annals of the Dallmeyer factory. If you're willing to poke around their web archive, you can actually dig out a surprising amount of info about the who, what, when, where, and how. Sure, the lists are far from complete and the site sometimes runs like it had a stroke, but let's be grateful it exists at all. That's not always the case. And I don't just mean someone bothered to compile the archives - first they had to bloody survive. Through wars, floods, and generations of people not giving a fuck. And to even have a shot at surviving, someone had to make them in the first place. And no, it doesn't apply to everyone—and yes, I'm looking at you, Swiss Suter.

So, why all the fuss about this lens?

Because it's a bloody masterpiece of craftsmanship. It's optically brilliant, it's got a variable soft-focus mechanism (something Ross didn't bother with) and—most importantly—it's got an aperture of f3. Sure, that doesn't exactly make people going mad nowadays. Every flea market is littered with Chinese crap boasting f0.95 and similar marketing-fueled specs. But here's the catch. No—scratch that. Here's the whopper.

It's the image circle. The coverage. The goddamn photographic battlefield. Most modern lenses barely manage to cover an APS-C sensor without breaking into a sweat. Maybe a full-frame if they're feeling badass (which, for the clueless, is a teeny-tiny 24x36mm, originally derived from one frame of 135mm film. Ha, bet you've always wondered where that weird number actually came from, right?). But this Dallmeyer? This bad boy covers damn near an A4 sheet of paper.

I won't bore you with too many technical details, but here's the kicker: the larger the format, the shallower the depth of field at the same aperture. Shooting at f3 on 135mm film? Meh. You take a portrait, and the whole person's acceptably sharp. Big whoop. But shoot at f3 on something like 8x10"? Oh boy. That's when the magic happens. You nail the eyes, whisper a prayer to Saint Scheimpflug, something twitches by a millimeter and bam—suddenly you're focused on a nostril or the edge of a single damn hair. Depth of field? Razor-thin. Blink and you've missed it.

This kind of thing raises the bar for both the person behind the camera and the poor soul in front of it. The slightest mistake? Enjoy your blurry mess. But when you nail it—really nail it—the depth of field and 3D effect look like they've been beamed in from another dimension. Want to compare it to modern tech? You'd need to build a lens for full-frame that shoots at f/0.4. Let me say that again: f-zero-point-four. And guess what? That's physically not gonna happen. And if by some miracle you did pull it off, it'd be a smudgy puddle of optical diarrhea riddled with every optical failures in our solar system.

• Yes, this is the simplified version. For the math fetishists and lens autists out there, feel free to dive into terms like "equivalent aperture," "image circle," "depth of field," or "crop factor." 
• But the aperture as fast as that one didn't just serve to please the eye—it also made life easier in the studios of the past. See, back in the day, photographic materials had the sensitivity of a blind mole. Daguerreotypes, Collodion process, you name it—exposures took ages. So faster lenses like this one weren't just sexy, they were revolutionary. They chopped exposure times from dozens of seconds down to fractions of a second. Total game-changer.

• Speaking of chloroform, it wasn't just a joke—it was actually used in the early days of photography to calm down infants and small children during long exposures. Back then, exposure times were long and patience—both of mothers and photographers—was short. But hey, in small doses, it can't be that bad, right? Like rum.

A little off-topic: the game known as "Statues" or "Green light, red light" is known in the Czech Republic as "Cukr káva limonáda, čaj rum bum", which could be translated as "Sugar coffee lemonade, tea rum boom." The whole thing rhymes in Czech and speeds up as the game progresses, so it is also a verbal pun. And Czech children obviously like rum and explosives. If you don't have a sedatives, the light is blinding, or you're trying to photograph a bunch of fidgety humans, an aperture comes in handy. Whether it's an old washer-style one, a Waterhouse slot system or a classic iris diaphragm—something's bound to be useful. And let's be real, while a bladed iris is the most complicated, most fragile and slightly eats up light, it's also the most user-friendly.

• Because unlike metal stops, you won't lose it! Well, at least not as easily. Those things disappear faster than odd socks—one moment they're there and the next they've joined the Bermuda Triangle of household objects.

• Sure, a bladed iris slightly dims the light transmission, but let's be real—lens manufacturers themselves had such creative math and "flexible" constants that their stated specs often drifted more than any mechanical loss from the iris. A tenth of a stop here, a tenth there—whatever. Your exposure meter (and you) will screw it up worse anyway.

Dreamy bokeh? Check. Contrast, sharpness, delicious vignetting? Check, check, check. An iris diaphragm? Damn right. And that indefinable magic? Look around—it's oozing character from every surface! And, if I may say so myself, I managed most of these shots without resorting to chloroform. The No.5 focal length is just right—pretty much perfect for head-and-shoulder portraits (obviously for the best format in the world, 8x10"). Wide open at infinity, the vignetting is intense, but that's par for the course with similar lenses like Dallmeyer 290mm f3, Hugo-Meyer 310mm f3, Darlot 300mm f4, Voigtländer f3.3, etc.

I've had both the modern version and an older type with rack & pinion focusing, waterhouse stops and a completely different chassis design—right down to the font and its layout. Optically, though? Identical. And both painted beautifully. Sitting on my shelf, waiting for sunny days and willing models, is the legendary Dallmeyer 3B—one of the few lenses actually capable of stepping into the ring and going toe-to-toe with my beloved Hermagis. So, I'll test it, I'll see it, and at some point, I'll write about it. Already wrote! But for now, let's circle back to the opening question—the one that's ultimately pointless and irrelevant: Which portrait lens is perfect? You already know the answer. None of them. And all of them. Each is beautifully flawed, uniquely imperfect. Because perfection, my friend, exists only in imperfection. Čaj rum bum.

• It was also a hot novelty back then: the anastigmat. An optical scheme with very well-corrected spherical aberration, astigmatism, and coma. Designed in 1890 by Dr. Paul Rudolph, its first two decades were more of an experimental phase. Crown's achievement is therefore doubly impressive.

So what about that promised resurrection? Here's the story: the lens arrived to me from faraway lands in a frightfully dilapidated state. The SF mechanism and aperture were fortunately relatively intact, but the most crucial part, the heart of the lens - the glass itself - was hopelessly separated. I did take some photos with it, and the results looked far better than one might expect from its outward appearance. Even so, it pained me to let something so rare suffer such a sad fate, so I began pondering what could be done.

• In this context, separation refers to the breakdown of the cement layer that bonds the optical elements together. Manufacturing flaws, improper storage, a fall or who knows what else can trigger separation. It manifests in various ways, but the common symptoms are a loss of contrast, sharpness, and an increased susceptibility to stray light. The cure is singular: remove the old "glue" and re-cement the lens.
• Back then, the glue was so-called Canadian balsam. This mixture of resin from the balsam fir (Pinus balsamea) and xylene in a 1:1 ratio creates a substance with a refractive index almost identical to quartz glass. Once cured with heat, this concoction becomes clear and bonds the optical elements together without negatively impacting image quality.

The theory of re-cementing was familiar to me, but it's much easier said than done. Just getting your hands on Canada balsam isn't exactly a walk in the park (and playing around with xylene at home is even less so). On the internet you'll find plenty of guaranteed guides on removing old adhesive by gently baking the lens in an oven (where you'll also bake the new adhesive in place) or slowly heating it in a pot of water. What these guides often leave out, however, is that you're running a high risk of thermal shock and irreparable cracking of the fragile, old glass.

• The whole concept of "cooking" lenses reminded me of the time I, blissfully unaware, stumbled across a surprisingly detailed online recipe for making homemade napalm. At least that one mentioned that boiling a pot of gasoline on your stovetop might be somewhat precarious - and might just blow up your house. And before you ask, no, I don't remember where I found that recipe. Probably somewhere in old family cookbook.

• I know my limits, and since I wasn't blessed with advanced knowledge of optics, I entrusted the entire project to a professional. The details are probably a closely guarded family secret, but the lenses are separated using acetone mixtures, and instead of the long-outdated Canada balsam, they're re-cemented using special polymer adhesives or UV-cured glues. These modern materials offer superior optical properties and are far less prone to degradation over time. However, the process is reversible only with significant difficulty - or not at all.

The Crown lens consists of four cemented elements. And OF COURSE, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM HAD TO BE REPAIRED. Sorry for yelling, but the odds of something like that are almost negative. Naturally, this kind of fun isn't cheap. I hemmed and hawed for a long time but ultimately gave in - just as Dante fetched Virgil from Limbo for one more journey, I decided to dragged the Crown from the clutches of obscurity and grant it new adventures. You can see its resurrection compared in the photos below.

And now the most important question: how does it shoot? The SF scale runs from 1 to 4, with level 1 being the sharpest option, free of any soft or overexposed areas. Level 4 is the maximum softness, and it's quite fascinating that even with a significant aperture stop-down, the SF effect remains easily visible - usually, such effects disappear irretrievably around f8. Overall, the effect is subtler compared to hardcore (softcore, hm?) pictorialist lenses, so don't expect anything as extreme as a wide-open Kodak Portrait. I'd liken it more to the Bausch & Lomb Portrait Unar and similar SF portrait lenses. That's not a bad thing - on the contrary, it makes it well-suited for portraits where you want to add just the right touch of love and softness.

Taken together, its versatility and small size (compare it to a Universal Heliar 300mm f4.5 or a Cooke, ha!) make it a surprisingly practical lens. Unfortunately, the photos below aren't as illustrative as I'd like them to be. First, they were all taken with the SF set to 1 because the ones with stronger settings didn't turn out as I'd hoped, and I wasn't about to embarrass myself. Second, these were taken before the repair. That means reduced contrast (though that's tricky - SF lenses are inherently less contrasty, so it's hard to pinpoint what's a feature versus a defect), increased sensitivity to side light and backlight, and no direct before-and-after comparison. A proper comparison will follow later, and I'll update it here. I hope you, dear reader, will understand and forgive my impatience - the urge to write this article outweighed my ability to wait.

As the year draws to a close, I hope you're planning to dedicate the next one to shooting even more photos on the largest formats possible. I'll leave you with a phrase that applies equally to the Crown, myself, and you: "Lazarus! Rise and shoot!"

Yes, I also had a dark (sharp?) ages when I blew my nose in disdain over soft photos as "stupidly focused photos where the photographer was as blind as a bat." Well, let it serve me right for looking down on my younger self. I had been flirting with soft output even before that, furiously twisting the rear elements of my <a href="https://negativnacestach.cz/en/dallmaer/ and trying to coax some life out of my ultra-mega-rare Crown (ha! Nothing to see here! Maybe one day I'll write an article! And I did!) Compared to the Kodak, though, these are still very restrained SF lenses, even at their maximum SF setting. It was the Kodak that finally showed me what real pictorialism looks like and how much I had been missing thanks to my own inflated ego. Yes, I also had a dark (sharp?) ages when I blew my nose in disdain over soft photos as "stupidly focused photos where the photographer was as blind as a bat." Well, let it serve me right for looking down on my younger self.

• Mister Kodak achieves the desired effect through the more noble variety of aberration: spherical. It's still an optical flaw, of course; an error of the lens. Light rays passing through different parts of the glass focus at different points. A spherical surface bends rays hitting the edges differently from those marching through the center. But! In a world where everything is dreamy and soft, this actually becomes an advantage, which you can see in the photos above—a kind of magic where the edges stay sharp, but a luminous halo spreads around them, soft like butter in August. Unlike chromatic aberration, spherical is monochromatic, so it doesn't even bother your life with colors. Spectacular! But more about this another time.

The lens has a downright wild rendering in backlight, full of bubbles and, with the right background, even a proper swirl effect. It handles overexposed scenes surprisingly well; strong contrasts between light and shadow and direct backlight push its shallow depth of field to the foreground and amplify that fantastical glow. Everything else is ethereal, creamy, dreamily overexposed—a true flag bearer of its breed. The lens comfortably covers 8x10" (the 405mm version sits a tier above), though sharpness and overall image cohesion fall off noticeably toward the edges. If that rubs you the wrong way (lily-livered!!), place your subject closer to the center or use the lens on 5x7" (and the 405mm on 8x10"). This works especially well for head-and-shoulders portraits where the longer focal length comes into play.

Portraiture is, if you wouldn't have guessed it from the name, the powerful aspect of Kodak. He wasn't one of the favorite portrait lenses of old Hollywood for no reason - the soft touch smoothed out the lines and made the young ones shine. In this case just keep the lighting subtle and gentle.

But whatever—be hard on yourself and shoot soft. Careful though, you might end up liking it and then there's no turning back. Because One Kodak to rule them all, one Kodak to find them, one Kodak to bring them all and in the softness bind them.

I'm a man of wide-open apertures, and the mere mention of the f/64 group makes me wave my hands while everyone wonders why my eyes are huge and I'm foaming at the mouth. So it's a lovely trait of the Raptar that it is unbelievably—I repeat, unbelievably sharp wide open, with strong contrast, great depth of field and bokeh. A rare combination that makes it a truly universal piece of glass for nearly any situation. If I had to nitpick, it would be the slightly slower f6.3 speed—a mild annoyance for portrait work, though with group photos you're stopping down like mad anyway.

Much like the Heliar, I take it when I've got no idea what awaits. It takes no space in the backpack and doesn't murder your spine. It especially shines with larger groups thanks to its flat field and edge-to-edge sharpness. That's mighty handy when you've got several rows of photo-hungry crowds behind one another.

And let it be said in honor of this sharp-taloned beast that it practically refused to let me take an out-of-focus picture, no matter the conditions—and trust me, I gave it plenty of chances.

• Arguably the rarest item in the portfolio is a series marked Series 0. These were portrait anastigmats with f3 aperture and a separate ring with adjustable soft-focus effect. A true blue blood testifying to a skill that few have achieved.

The output (for chart lovers it is a later revision of the Series III No.10, 16.25in/400mm f7.7) is just sharp enough with very nice contrast and enough coverage for the 8x10" format (when fully open it will cover 10x12" at infinity, so it has plenty of movement on the smaller formats). The lens is also, like the triplets, very amenable to "fake" soft-focus, which can be adjusted by screwing the front—the result is pleasing and not unlike much more expensive specimens designed for this purpose. Its pleasant weight and small dimensions thus predestine it for universal use under almost any conditions and requirements. And thanks to the unusual dark bronze-gold lacquer on the brass body, it's also nice to look at.

Over the years I have only come across two examples—both in my hands—and both with experiences from the Indian subcontinent. The first served for many years under the British colonialists in a studio in Bombay and then in Kerala, where it also remained after 1947 and independence from the British Empire—before coming to me in Prague. The second found a home in Pakistan, as evidenced by the signing on the body—"Shanco The Mall Lahore." The meaning of the first words remains unclear; but Lahore is the largest city in the country. Pakistan separated from India in the same year as the collapse of the British Raj, but unlike the first case, this piece has returned to its motherland... before he came to see me in Prague.

The presence of imperial technology in the territory of the Dominion is not surprising, yet the level of Aldis presence in this particular part of the Commonwealth surprised me and I searched for the reasons. In the dusty shelves of British university libraries I eventually found a plausible cause - the family had lived here for some time and Lancelot was born in Calcutta in 1870 before being sent back to England at the age of five. He seems not to have forgotten his native land and he kept it well supplied with his factory toys. Thanks for that, almost-knight Lancelot—I immediately look at your lenses differently, wondering what exotic adventures they must have had and will no longer tell.