Close-up photography with a CZJ Biometar 80mm F2.8

Gerald · Joined: 25 Mar 2014 Posts: 1196 Location: Brazil

This afternoon I played a bit with one of my zebra Biometars 80mm F2.8, which are an inheritance from my Pentacon Six system. The Biometar 80mm F2.8 is a well known lens, but is not so popular for several reasons. For example, many people that would give an arm and a leg to have an Pancolar 85mm F1.8, passes away the Biometar 80mm F2.8 because they consider the Biometar a "slow" lens. Last but not least, the Biometar 80mm F2.8 is not a very expensive lens, but it's certainly not cheap. People prefer buy twenty $10 lens than one that costs $200... Laughing

As I said elsewhere, I have four copies of Biometar CZJ 80mm F2.8. In principle I do not like having multiple copies of the same lens, but three were the standard lenses of my Pentacon Six TL cameras. The fourth Biometar was a gift from an old photographer who was retiring; it is the older version with leather in the focusing ring. For some reason, this lens does not perform as well as the others, especially wide open. Nonetheless, after F5.6 the performance tends to be more or less equal to the other lenses. Two of Biometars accompanying my Pentacon Six are zebra version; the other is the newest MC version with knurled focusing ring.

Except for the first two pictures, all the others were taken using achromatic close-up lenses of 1.6 and 4 diopters. I did not record the apertures used, but I remember they were between F8 and F11 for most pictures. To evaluate sharpness, I also show the 100% crops. If the full images were shown on a scale of 100%, they would have a width of more than 2 meters.

Picture 1:

Picture 1 - 100% crop:

Picture 2:

Picture 3:

Picture 3 - 100% crop:

Picture 4:

Picture 4 - 100% crop:

Picture 5:

Picture 5 - 100% crop:

Picture 6:

Picture 6 - 100% crop:

Picture 7:

Picture 7 - 100% crop: