Soligor Universal Automatic T-4 Lens system (70s)

eggplant · Joined: 27 May 2020 Posts: 517

FULL ALBUM https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjzyQbD

Soligor Universal Automatic T-4 Lens system front by - -, on Flickr

Soligor Universal Automatic T-4 Lens system reverse by - -, on Flickr

Sample lens diagram:

Crop:

I did a look on Google Books to date this, and found varying dates of 1973-1975. I leave it up to better experts to find the exact date.

Notes on process

This wasn't a perfectly flat document, but the end results are all within a similar quality band. Or, they're decently sharp over most of the details.
Uneven illumination can be a product of the document not being perfectly flat when using one light source from one direction, which I was.

I'm still not perfectly satisfied with my setup, which is why I've held off from doing anything major like the second Olympus lens brochure.

Lighting has been solved by an overhead projector which belches out nice, even light over a wide area. 1-2 of the scans in the album are abit uneven (e.g. 35mm f2. Cool

, but not as bad as it was before.

There's abit of slop in my bellows to remove.

Most importantly I need a book stand to do glued books, or books I otherwise don't want to disassemble (which is all of them). I have a very detailed Tokina book from circa 1980 which sheds light on a bunch of lenses you've never seen diagrams of.

I went through and got images of all the diagrams, but cocked it up with an uneven lighting setup, and using scanner glass to flatten the book- didn't work towards the end where the book would not flatten. So stuff like this is on the way, soon: https://i.postimg.cc/fWVb1tbc/DSC2552.jpg

You can read the settings I used (resizing/compression) in the album description.
I don't have a powerful scanner, just a USB Canoscan LiDE 120. You just need to play around with compression settings and resizes.

eggplant · Joined: 27 May 2020 Posts: 517

Commentary

First time I've seen the 21mm f3.8 diagram, and cutaway aswell.

I think this has a completely different optical formula to the other 20/21mm f3.8 out there.

Consider-

Vivitar 21mm f/3.8 T-4, seen in this 1970 advertisement https://www.flickr.com/photos/136094828@N04/41313838390/:

(Kino/Kiron) Vivitar 20mm f3.8, 1969 or 1971, seen in this repair manual https://learncamerarepair.com/downloads/pdf/Vivitar-20mm-f38-Parts.pdf:

The Soligor T4 21mm f3.8:

So it appears there's variation among these lenses. There's a good chance the Vivitar seen in the advertisement is just a slightly differently drawn Soligor. But the Kiron one is totally different.

Also, it's interesting to see the Sonnar/Ernostar design give way to a telephoto one after 250mm.

kansalliskala · Expire: 2016-12-30

The T4 system looks like very easy to break?

55 · Expire: 2022-06-15

Thanks for the thorough documentation, eggplant.

55 · Expire: 2022-06-15