Palinar 135mm f/3.5

Palinar 135mm f/3.5 / Canon 5D MkII / vodka and Mountain Dew

Off to eBay again. A while back I had a look at an old lens from long ago, a Palinar 35mm f/2.8 from the early 1960s. It was manufactured in Japan by one of Tokina's early incarnations and imported to the UK by a chap called Charles Strasser, who was himself an import (from Czechoslovakia). Palinar was one of those made-up brands, and the lens was also sold as a Soligor, Hanimex, Sears, Lentar etc. Every time I check eBay another brand name appears - as I write these words eBay has a Solitel 135mm for all of £8. As the saying goes, if it floats like a butterfly but stings like a bee, it's a duck.

On a Pentax Spotmatic. It's very compact. It appears to be single-coated. Minimum focus is just under six feet, which is I suppose the price to pay for the compact design.

I used a 5D for the flavour images, reason being that it was a dull day and I needed higher ISOs.

And, yes, all brands are made-up, but some brands are more substantial than others - obviously, giants such as DeHavilland or Woolworths are unlikely to vanish overnight, and in America the likes of Pan-Am, Branff, and AMC will almost certainly still be around by the year 2000. People will always need to fly and/or drive places.

Palinar, on the other hand, was invented on a whim and vanished unmourned sometime in the early 1970s, if Google Books is to be believed. The lenses still turn up on eBay.

The subject of this post is a short telephoto that would probably have been sold as part of a kit, perhaps paired with a 35mm f/2.8. It would have complemented an SLR's standard 50mm lens at the long end. 135mm is a classic focal length - from what I remember it was the longest that could be easily focused with a rangefinder - and of course nowadays it has been displaced by 70-300mm telephoto zooms, although there are a few 135mm primes still on the market.

It seems that the focal length is easy to design for, and 135mm primes are amongst the best-performing lenses available (the vintage Zeiss Jena 135mm f/3.5 and the modern Canon 135mm f/2.0, for example, always do well in tests). On the other hand it can be awkward, too long and slow for indoors, not long enough for birding or aeroplanes, nowhere near long enough for safaris. On an APS-C camera 135mm becomes a more useful 200mm.

My assumption is that if I see a photographer with a modern 135mm, he has probably thought long and hard about his choice, and he knows what he's doing.

As you can see, the minimum focus distance is frustratingly long. Also, cats can leap a surprisingly long distance.

Proto-Tokina made lenses with a special screw mount, and fitted adapter rings for popular camera models - mine has an M42 adapter. It's unproblematic on a Canon 5D. The front element group unscrews and the lens is easy to clean up, although as with my 35mm f/2.8 it was surprisingly free of fungus and even dust. The lens is solidly made out of metal, which might explain why it has survived so well for so long.

The aperture uses a preset system, where you set a stop ring to the appropriate position, and when you want to meter or take the shot you quickly twist the aperture ring so that it hits the stop. It's really easy to use and, if you're filming, the stepless aperture is a nice touch.

A full-sized crop of the centre of a 21mp full-frame image, wide open (top) and then at f/8 (bottom), with no sharpening. The difference is noticeable but not really *notable*.

Ditto in the corners. There's some greeny-purple CA, which I could heave easily fixed. As you can see it's not bitingly sharp, quite probably no better than a modern 70-300mm zoom, but again I don't have a problem with its performance. If there's any distortion, I can't measure it.

A real-world example, shot wide open at ISO 400. It's a manual focus lens, and I use the 5D's EG-S manual focus screen, which seems to work.

By all accounts the classic Zeiss 135mm f/3.5 is sharp across the frame wide open, and of course if you want a 135mm there's no reason not to buy that instead - they consistently go for £50 on eBay.co.uk - but I didn't want a 135mm. In fact I bought this lens because it had one of Tokina's M42 adapters, and also the Palinar name stood out.

eBay has masses of old 135mm lenses for almost nothing because no-one wants them, but very few Palinars. They're half a century old, and no-one cared much about the brand, so old examples have been thrown away, which is a shame because the two I've used so far have been optically pretty good; the original owners would have had no complaints.

Palinar 35mm f/2.8

Off to the wilds of eBay, where people dump junk from the past. Palinar was one of several made-up brands that imported lenses from the Far East back in the 1960s, and I mean all brands are made-up, aren't they? It would be more accurate to say that Palinar was a brand of convenience, a name conjured from the great soupy melting pot of human thought in order to put some clothes on the naked, crawling reality of international commerce.

Palinar was part of a large British import business called Photopia, which was founded by a man called Charles Strasser in 1962. Strasser was born in Czechoslovakia, but his family was perceptive enough to emigrate to the UK in 1938. He seems to have led a charmed life. Photopia didn't go bust; Strasser sold the company in the late 1970s, and it still exists today (it services Ricoh cameras and distributes Sekonic light meters, among other things). Strasser himself was awarded an OBE in 2000 and is apparently still alive. Palinar lenses have "ST" as part of the serial number, after Strasser's surname. Generally when writing about old camera gear from long ago the story involves economic collapse, bankruptcy, failed dreams, personal dissolution and failure and death. What made Strasser break even, at least? My hunch is that sheer random chance and not messing up too badly had something to do with it.

Mounted on a Canon EOS 5D MkII

The lenses were made by a company called Tokyo Koki, which went on to become Tokina; they were imported and rebranded by other companies as well, with a plethora of brand names, including Soligor, Hanimex, Sears, Lentar, Galaxy, a few even used the Tokyo Koki name itself. I pronounce it Tokey-Kinky in my mind. The early Tokey-Kinky lenses used a special screw mount system unique to Tokyo Koki, and here's a blog post involving several Japanese women and a statue of a fat baseball player. The lenses came with an adapter ring, fixed with screws, that fit popular cameras of the day.

Two Palinar lenses, both very small; a Palinar 135mm f/3.5 short telephoto and a 35mm f/2.8, with a home-made EOS mount.

The Palinar 35mm f/2.8 jumped out at me because (a) it was cheap (b) it was tiny. It came without an adapter ring, and initially I thought it used the T-mount system, but no. Some JB Weld and a T-mount adapter later and it now has an EOS mount. The minimum focus distance is thus quite far, which is actually a good thing because the rear of the lens would hit my 5D's mirror if it had the original mount.

Irritatingly, just a few days later eBay threw up a Palinar 135mm f/3.5, which I'll look at in a separate post; it came with the appropriate M42 mount. Optically the 135mm f/3.5 is very good, although it has to be said that good 135mm f/3.5 lenses are a dime a dozen. The only Palinar lens with anything approaching a cult following is a 100mm f/4 design, notable for its compact size.

The vignetting is concentrated at the bottom corners, so presumably I didn't quite centre the lens in the T-mount.

The lens is, as far as I can tell, single-coated, although it almost looks uncoated. It uses an old-fashioned preset aperture ring, whereby you focus wide open and then twist shut the (stepless) aperture until it hits a preset stop. In practice I left this at f/8 and just stopped the aperture down until the shutter speed was 1/125th or so.

By chance I walked past the Egypt Exploration Society. Founded in 1882. Britain took control of Egypt in 1882 in a context not far removed from the current Greek debt crisis, except that Egypt was more valuable to the outside world than Greece is today. I wonder how many Victorian explorers set off from Doughty Mews to explore Egypt, with their moustaches and leather cases, by steam train and steamer and camel.

I can't judge the image quality, because I'm using a non-standard, home-made mount. My particular lens is essentially very sharp in the middle wide open, but with ropey edges and corners; stopped down to f/8 the image quality ascends to the level of a decent zoom lens, although on the positive side there's almost no CA. On an APS-C camera it would be a decent 50mm f/2.8, and it's tiny, there is that.

The two lenses have 49mm filter threads. They're both solidly built out of metal. Judging by the 1969 Photo Trade World Yearbook Palinar's 35mm f/2.8 cost around £38 in 1969, depending on the lens mount, and according to the Bank of England's website that's £558 today, and so I conclude that photography was a rich man's hobby in the 1960s.

On a purely economic level the Palinar 35mm f/2.8 was insanity, because the awesome power of inflation has evaporated that precious £558 into nothingness. Would the lens have given you £558 worth of fun? That's a lot of drink and a couple of hours with a lady, but come the morning the lens would still be there.

With a handful of exceptions, even the cultiest and most sought-after vintage camera gear depreciates like mad. Watches, cars, complex physical goods require expense servicing - a kind of anti-dividend - and gold bars are awkward. Perhaps a few very rare Leicas or exotic lenses appreciate, but they were probably very expensive when they were new. Property makes a lot more sense as a long-term investment, because it's exceptionally useful while you have it and there's only a limited amount of space on the planet. And the government is on your side, because MPs are homeowners as well.

You know, economists say that deflation is terrible because it makes people put off purchases until the future, when the price has declined, thus hurting the economy now. But are we supposed to believe that people will stop buying food, clothes, and season tickets until the price drops, even at the risk of starvation or being dismissed for not turning up to work? And as prices fall, employees are less likely to raise a fuss about their declining income.

And surely the entire IT / technology / gadget industry has always been beset by rampant deflation, hmm? Computer equipment doesn't just drop in price as time goes by, it drops in price at lighting speed. Volume goes up and the high end advances. And whereas an old car can still move you from A to B, an old iPhone is basically useless (no sane man would be seen dead with an iPhone 3 in 2015). There's a common dilemma whereby you aren't sure whether to buy Technical Revolution #44 today or wait for two months until Technical Revolution #45 is launched, despite which the market for games consoles and computer hardware has... well, actually it has declined over the last few years, but that's because people are buying tablets and mobile phones with the limited amount of money they have left after paying off the loan they took out for the 3D television.

Hopefully the demand for mobile phones will continue to grow at its current rate, and what with the advent of 4K televisions I confidently predict that 2015 will be the best year ever, economy-wise.
Non-sequiturs are like feminism; but why take that chance?