7Artisans 75mm f:1,25 - Return of the Biotar? 

Loving your context and analysis! Subscribed :) The spherical formats clearly account for some of the "film look"

I was lucky that way... when I was a teenager the local library had microfilms of old photo magazines going all the way back to the '30s. I could just get out a spool and read a whole year's worth. Was fascinating to read what photographers had to put up with when "vintage" equipment was new...

Christian Obe thanks!!

Thank you!

Yes, it has shot up like a lot of other vintage lenses, and I suspect the reason is the same for all: You can adapt almost any lens to a mirrorless camera. Before that happened, the Exakta- and Praktica-mount Biotars were at least sort of semi-reasonable in price, because the only way to use them was on an Exakta (or Topcon) or Praktica (or Pentax) and not very many people wanted to go to the bother of doing that. The Leica and Contax versions were always pricey, both because they were rare and because Leica and Contax users were willing to shoot with them despite the inconvenience. I always found mine a little frustrating -- the results it gave were either beautiful or useless, never anything in between -- but now that so many people are interested in lens "character," that's apparently a plus!

@@jlwilliams I've been adapting old lenses to Canon EF mount for over a decade. You can adapt Exakta to EF, but I guess people didn't do that very often. I got a mirrorless Olympus EP1 early on so I could try out even more weird lenses. I've been shooting Fuji for years, now (I recently got a GFX 50R - and I'm having fun re-testing my collection of lenses on that big sensor)

@@jlwilliams I've also always wanted to try the Primoplan 75 1.9, but that's even more rare/expensive than the Biotar 75 😩

Yeah, I like being in one of those stories! Factors: it was super banged up (barrels on East German lenses were soft aluminum and very wear-prone, sticking RF coupler etc.); also, this was before the Internet, so it wasn't so easy to research rarity and prices. Still, it makes me think there may be more LTM 75 Biotars in drawers and on dusty back shelves than the usual figures quoted (3?)

Hello… no, not all the 7Artisans lenses use the Biotar formula. They make other lenses that use other formulas, and so does TTArtisan. They usually put a lens diagram on the box, and that's often the only way to know what you're getting! Good luck with your lens hunt… it can really be a challenge…

It sounds like it has potential, but I've never tried it. As you know, my channel doesn't accept compensation (not even review units) and I can't afford to buy everything interesting for my own use. One potential downside is that it seems kind of enormous (which is problematic on a rangefinder camera because of viewfinder intrusion) while the 75mm is fairly compact. Anyone out here in comment-land have any experience with this lens?

I couldn't find a published spec anywhere, but I measured across the flats of the supplied tool with a digital caliper and got 1.55-1.6 mm, so I'm guessing the nominal size would be 1.5 mm. Going by a quick look on Amazon, it seems this must be a fairly common size for RC helicopters and racing drones, so it shouldn't be too hard to find. Good luck and let us know if you find a driver that fits!

@@jlwilliams ok thank you so much! And if my eyes aren’t failing me, it appears to be a hex head?

@@xulab I had to use a 10x loupe to be sure, but yes, it's a hex. Thank goodness it's not some crazy pentalobe thing...

ditto1958 I expect you're right. What puzzles me is that when a company is trying to establish itself as a brand name, as 7Artisans seems to want to do, one of the first things it does is to appoint a brand manager who makes sure the products, packaging, and documentation are consistent in style. To pick an extreme example, Apple products are made by contract manufacturers all over the world, but Apple exercises very tight control over their consistency so everything is always recognizable as an Apple product. It just surprised me that 7Artisans isn't doing this.

Thank you for the info! I hope I get a chance to use it. If you have one, could you put up any sample photos? Thanks again...

@@jlwilliams M50/0.95 and about two or three other M-mount tens will be published as well in late 2020 ,says one of 7-artisans ' member in an official chat group. 7-artisans plans to publish each new lens every month or maybe every 2 months starting from June. Thank you for your video too. You taught us real optical 'knowledge' instead of metaphysics. Love you, cheer for you.

It IS interesting - the title is "Ballet in Action," published in 1938, by the English photographer Merlyn Severn (later a well-known photographer for the British magazine Picture Post.) She was one of the first people to succeed in taking action pictures of stage performances, which was REALLY difficult with the films available in the 1930s... also, too dim for the primitive light meters of the era, so she had to keep meticulous records of every exposure. The 1938 edition is a bit rare and hard to find, but there was a second edition of 1947 that's available from various Amazon sellers.

No, I sold it because I got a Pixii A1571 and it wouldn't work on that (diameter too large.) I'd still recommend it if you like the "dreamy" full-aperture look. I used it on my Bessa R3m and it worked well on that, so it should work on your R2m also. If you like the 75mm focal length and want something that's more conventionally sharp at full aperture, the Voigtlander 75/1.5 is probably worth a look, although I'm going by friends' experiences because I haven't tried it myself. If you get one, be sure to post up and let us know what you think!

@@jlwilliams thanks for the reply! I'm also looking at the Voigtlander 75, and I'm leaning towards that one since it seems more consistent. The 7A is definitely much cheaper though so I'm conflicted!

I wouldn't say “based,” in the sense of copying it. But as I noted in the video, everybody during the 1940s was trying to solve the same problem of making a medium-telephoto lens with a maximum aperture greater than f/2, and they were all driven to Gauss designs because the Sonnar design couldn't be stretched that far. It seems evident that Carl Zeiss Jena would realize that since everybody was playing out of the same playbook, one obvious way to get the benefits of smaller size, lighter weight, and simpler optical construction would be to drop down from 85mm to 75mm. All these years later 7Artisans was facing the same problem - designing a wide-aperture medium tele of acceptable performance without resorting to costly aspherical elements, as Leica did - and the same benefits of making it a 75mm instead of 85 or 90 must have occurred to them. So, speculation, yes, but I think it's defensible speculation if you look at the history of what various makers were doing in the '40s and '50s.

@@jlwilliams Thanks that makes sense,,i have ordered one partly based on your video but also a chinese language video full of beautiful portraits of a young women ,very much looking forward to trying out the lens on my m262 camera.

The short answer would be no. Mind you, any time you get into the taxonomy of lens family names, you're asking for trouble, because people still get VERY worked up over which lens belongs in what family, even though Leica and Zeiss no longer use these names to distinguish specific optical designs, and any discussion of them in online forums tends to attract the same kind of antler-clashing that that male deer get into during rutting season, and you wind up attracting a lot of smug commentary along the lines of, "No, that's a Planar design, you idiot." Let's hope this doesn't go there! Anyway... [drawing on the categories used in Rudolf Kingslake's book "Lenses in Photography", just so you'll know I'm not pulling all this stuff out of my hat] the Biotar and Sonnar are NOT relatives, because the Sonnar is an asymmetrical design, while the Biotar is basically a symmetrical design -- if you look at the block diagrams, you'll see that the two halves of the Biotar (on either side of the diaphragm) are pretty much mirror images of each other, while the Sonnar is "heavier" on one side. Kingslake classifies the Biotar as a member of the Cooke Opic family of symmetrical Gauss-type objectives; the original Opic lens was released in 1920 by Taylor, Taylor and Hobson, and its symmetrical six-element arrangement (a single element, then a cemented pair, then the diaphragm, then another cemented pair mirroring the first, then a single rear element mirroring the front element) is still seen today in the diagrams of many moderately-wide-aperture lenses of slightly wide to slightly long focal lengths. On the other hand, Kingslake classifies the Sonnar as basically a triplet lens (an asymmetrical arrangement of three lens elements) with additional elements added to compensate for various optical problems. All the lenses of this type (Kingslake calls them "high-aperture triplets," even though many of them have as many as seven elements) can be distinguished by the fact that their block diagrams are not at all symmetrical: usually there are more elements on one side of the diaphragm than the other, they're larger and thicker, and the two sides aren't even close to being mirror images of each other. What difference does this make to you as a photographer? Nowadays, not much. Back when the Opic first appeared, people realized that the Gauss-type symmetrical lenses were theoretically better because this construction allowed finer correction of optical flaws. But the high-aperture triplets (e.g. Sonnar) often performed better in real life: they had fewer air-to-glass surfaces (which cause lens flare, a real problem until lens coating was invented in the late 1930s) and it's easier to assemble them accurately because many of the elements are cemented together instead of having to be mounted separately in the lens barrel. Today, with lens coating and better precision manufacturing technology, managing all those separate elements isn't as big a problem, so the symmetrical Opic type (such as the Biotar) is more widely used, although a few Sonnar types are still floating around (such as the 7Artisans 35mm f/2 and 50mm f/1.1 I've reviewed elsewhere) because some of us like the interesting sharp-yet-hazy look they provide. Does that help at all? Thanks for your interest!

@@jlwilliams thanks for the detailed reply,very helpful,i think the zeiss 50mm f1.5 zm is a sonnar........anyway will be trying out my 7 artisans 75mm on my m262 over the xmas now its arrived.

I don't disagree with you, but I don't completely agree with you either. The hat is in a little better focus than the front plane of the face, but not much (it's easier to see this on the original slide than on RU-vid) but the face glows more because it's lighter. I have a lot of other slides from this set and my take based on all of them is that at full aperture, the highlights are going to glow a bit even if you nail focus on the highlight areas, although better focus would keep them more compact as you suggest. Thanks for your interest!

@@jlwilliams Obviously I can't talk about other photos, but of this, I can. The seams of the hat are quite contrasted and do not seem to me to have any kind of glowing. If there is the possibility to see the file better somewhere, I will gladly evaluate it. Very often what is considered to be a simple out of focus and the field of fire of many lenses with old optical patterns is not a straight line at all, it is an arc. This leads to the edges being out of focus when the cent is in focus (which is why the edges are often less defined).

Oh, yes! One thing people like about M-mount lenses is that it's so easy to adapt them to various kinds of mirrorless cameras. Naturally I wanted to see how its results would look on several cameras at my disposal... why not?