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Picked up another vintage lens. This one is strange. It's a dual focal length prime. That's right, it's not a zoom, it's a lens with two built in focal length positions.
Soligor Dualfocal 85mm & 135mm F4
Soligor Dualfocal 85mm & 135mm F4
Don't ask me, I know little about how that works but it's what they did haha. It's a prime 85mm and a prime 135mm in one. Unlike a zoom lens, you do turn a ring just like a zoom, but it has two hard stops w/ lock positions for each focal length. You can see a zoomed imagine while turning it between positions, but you can't focus on anything outside the two ranges, because the glass isn't there for it. It's a bit on the slower side, at just f4, so this isn't one for shooting to blow out the background, but from a few shots, it looks like some nice sharp glass. I did try it wide open on 135mm and it shot super soft. That's ok though, since it's not fast enough to worry about shooting wide open anyway, stopping it down to f16 here, provides some nice, everything in focus, clean, sharp, high depth of field photos. Surprisingly sharp in fact. I really didn't expect this. As you can see (they're downsized of course, but still) it's running right side by side with Nikons modern (well, that is 2011 and still in production) 50mm (in a couple posts back) and that's well known for being some nice glass. I'll play with it some more but if it shoots this nice at 85mm too, then it's a keeper.
This one was introduced in 1981. Has 9 elements in 6 groups w/ 6 blade aperture. From what I gather, Soligor wasn't a lens manufacturer, they just sold them under their name and have a few co's make their lenses for them. This one is much better than my Soligor 135mm 2.8 but I dunno if I just have a poor copy of that one. It's odd, in that it's backwards of lenses, it only shoots good wide open and soft stopped down haha, That's why I think that one might be a copy issue, but who knows. That's the issue with vintage lenses, and why reviews can vary so widely sometimes when it comes to old glass. Anyway, this dual focal, sure is an interesting one. I doubt too many would ever guess I shot these with 44 year old glass, if I never told them.
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