Telemegor 180mm cf Tamron 103A

[scsambrook]

Sometimes it's good to make utterly unfair and inappropriate comparisons - in the spirit of pushing back the boundaries of knowledge, of course.

I have a Meyer Telemegor 180mm f5.5 from the 1960s (but designed aeons before then) and aTamron 80-210 Model 103A (designed in the late 1980s) which I only bought to get the Adaptall mount. Today I made an informal and very unscientific test in my garden - a bright breezy day with the leaves and flowers waving cheerfully in the wind. The only evidence of sensible methodology was to use a tripod !

1 - Telemegor at full aperture (a modest f5.5) showing its "dreamy" quality


2: Telemegor at f11 looking quite sharp


3: Tamron at f11 and about 180mm


Three quite different images, perhaps doing nothing more than to remind us that lenses don't need to be exotic to be pleasing. The 103A is really very good as a tool for doing big-flower-heads, but I need to use a tripod because I tend to rock slightly between pressing the release and the shutter firing, so I lose the correct plane of focus.

The Telemgor is interesting in that it's actually easier to focus at f11 than at f5.5 - the "halo" effect of the under corrected spherical aberation makes it quite hard to judge, at least on the screen of my K100D Super. It's even trickier on my old EOS 650, and on my Pentax P30 the rangefinder wedges black out and the image is even harder to judge in the microprisms. Maybe what we need is plain ground glass, like the Zenith E and the Leitz Visoflex.

[GrahamNR17]

As you say, all three are very different, but very pleasing in their own right. I was a 'glass snob' until I came here, and found out what can be achieved with very modest lenses.

Interesting comparison, thanks for sharing

[Seele]

Do not forget that the Tele-Megor was designed in the "large format" idiom and was optimised to work at a very small range of apertures, normally f/22 give or take, although when using it on a smaller format (smaller angular coverage) you can use an aperture one or two stops larger. The Tamron, like all lenses specifically designed for the 35mm format, was designed with a totally different methodology, hence different performance characteristics.