Wednesday, May 4, 2011

Mailbox: rare Wollensak lens

 
The latest victim of my C-mount frenzy has arrived and it's a beauty: a rare Wollensak 1 inch 1.5 Cine-Velostigmat. It's in great shape, considering its age. This lens must be at last 50 years old, looking at the materials and the history of the company. The Wollensak firm branched off Bausch & Lomb in 1899 and started producing lenses a few years later. It's heydays were in the 50's and it went bankrupt in 1972. I am all for recycling and reusing and find it great that new use is being found for all these great products from the past. If it wasn't for the M43 camera's, these lenses would have rusted away and ground to dirt in dumpsites. A few would have been preserved by collectors or found their way to musea. But now they're back and in demand, taking pictures again of a world quite different from what they saw 50 to 100 years ago.

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