Kodak Retinar 2.5/90

alex ph · Joined: 16 Mar 2013 Posts: 1674

Kodak Retinar 2.5/90 is another high grade metal-barrel slide projection lens. The barrel diameter is larger than the standard 42.5mm and touches 52mm thus joining some Agfa lenses, such as Agolon and Agomar.

The following shots are taken with Sony Nex and the "sanitary" PVC adapter. At one moment the adapter was slightly misplaced from the basement, and that created tilt effect visible in some shots. It is inobservable in some others.

A couple of shots are similar to the ones taken with Will-Wetzlar Lumagon 2.8/50 MC, so might be directly compared with.

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visualopsins · Expire: 2025-04-11

Very nice!

alex ph · Joined: 16 Mar 2013 Posts: 1674

Thank you, visualopsins!

simple.joy · Joined: 30 May 2022 Posts: 646

Looks great - very nice shots! Do you know if Kodak made them or if they were outsourced? Is there any "Made in…" on it?

alex ph · Joined: 16 Mar 2013 Posts: 1674

Thank you so much!

I was making the same question. No signs of origin. Even the letters on the beauty ring look, how to say it better, pretty generic.

But this does not hurt the lens' merits.

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alex ph · Joined: 16 Mar 2013 Posts: 1674

The issue of the lacking diaphragm in this projector lens at the bright sun is resolved with "finger aperture", i.e. putting two or more fingers in front of the lens, as a quick way to lower the brightness, while the camera is in aperture priority mode. Sometimes this gives a red or rose tint to the image, kind of retro or expired film effect. Sometimes it hurts sharpness on the edges of the shot, as pressing fingers slightly distorts the reception of the relevant parts of the image. In some other cases the resulting frame is just very good. Anyway, post processing of bright sunlight shots, even "finger diaphragmed" requires negative exposure compensation, sometimes halving the original one in order to restore colour vibrance and detail.

Here are some samples from the wild taken and PPed in such a way. After changing the scenery from the shaded urban to a sun drenched one, sharpness, colour and overall plasticity of the image remain equally good even in quite severe exercise of exposure corrections.

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alex ph · Joined: 16 Mar 2013 Posts: 1674

A resized stitched pano, clickable