Playing with vintage Germans ...

... A minty sample of Isco Göttingen Westron 35 f/2.8, coming from the usual source ;-) ...
For the history fans, Isco Göttingen is a lens manufacturer since 1936, when it started producing lenses for the Exacta and Praktica cameras (informations collected from Internet, if someone could enlighten me ... thanks). Most of the lenses produced for these cameras had a metal barrel, in the classic chrome, zebra and black finish. Between its best performers, there are the Tele-Iscaron 180mm f/2.8, with a rotating tripod collar, the Westrocolor 50mm f/1.9, the Westrogon 24mm f/4, and a quite unusual lens, the 50mm f/2.8 Iscorama. This lens, very rare to find, permits horizontal or vertical picture shrinkage during the shooting session: using two buttons to rotate the front element, nice effects can be obtained (cannot say more, don't have this one ...).
The Westron 35 belongs to the late Isco production, when some metallic elements where replaced by more cheap plastic parts. This gives the Westron a look of toy, which certainly harmed its reputation: on the second hand market, the Westron 35 is much cheaper than the (over-evaluated, imho) Carl Zeiss Flektogon 35, in both 2.4 and 2.8 versions, costing about 4 times less ... Nevertheless, its images are really sharp, and the color rendering really neutral, without dominants, at least in my sample. The lens is subject to flare, so a shade is recommended. The diaphragm spans from f/2.8 to f/16, and is composed by 8 blades (giving a nice bokeh), controlled by a stepless preset ring: there is a button to preset the smallest aperture, then it can be focused wide open, and stopped down to the preset aperture very quickly. Useless to say, when f/16 is preset, the lens can be stopped down from f/2.8 to f/16 continuously. The filter thread is 49mm, like most of the lenses of that epoch, and it is surrounded by a collar, not threaded, which could be (possibly) used for a kind of shade ...
For the fans of history, Isco Göttingen has stopped its production of camera lenses, focusing on cinema taking and projection lenses.

Here is a picture of the "toy", taken with a Tamron SP 90 f/2.5 Macro, in late afternoon daylight.



A lot of sample images coming ...