Birns&Sawyer Omnitar (Tewe Berlin) 400mm f/5

[luisalegria]

Klaus actually found this for me, on a Canadian ebay auction.

Thanks Klaus!







Birns&Sawyer Omnitar (Tewe Berlin) 5/400 400mm f/5 (marked 1.5)

This is a Tewe Berlin lens imported by Birns&Sawyer of Hollywood CA, probably made in the mid-1960's.

Tewe was a lensmaker of some degree of mystery, perhaps a member can clear it up. The company, Technische Werke Weiste & Co. OHG was founded either in 1935 (see here http://photobutmore.de/exakta/berliner/) or just after WWII, and ceased production in 1971 or 1972. They were based in the Shoneberg district of what was then West Berlin. It seems to have been a competitor of Astro Berlin for similar markets, mainly long cine lenses, of which I have seen a range of 150-2000mm, much like Astro. Cameraquest says it acquired Astro sometime in the 1960's. They also made various other optical devices such as well-regarded movie directors viewfinders and variable viewfinders for rangefinder cameras.

Some of its trade names included "Votar" "Telagon" "Telastan" "Telon", etc. I have found pictures of Tewe-branded lenses that are obviously identical to mine, save for cosmetics, labelled as "Votar". The name "Votar" itself is interesting, as that was a trademark of Piesker. Could it have also acquired something from Piesker, which was defunct in the early 1960's? Its lenses don't look much like Pieskers, of which I have had several.

Birns&Sawyer is much better known, and is still in business today - http://www.birnsandsawyer.com/.
It was founded by Jack Birns, a noted photojournalist of the 1940's-50's. A great deal of his work is available on the internet. He has a wiki article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Birns
Anyway, Birns&Sawyer was and is essentially a service company for the movie industry, acting as equipment dealers, service, rental, and doing technical consulting, and they seem to have manufactured and marketed various unique devices in that field. Among other things they imported and sold lenses from Tewe under their brand, though I don't think they did so for any other maker.

This lens is obviously a cine lens in design. It is a simple cemented doublet (two elements in one group) like similar Astro and Piesker or (US made) Century lenses intended for the same purpose. It is manual aperture (f/5-32), not preset, and has no click stops, a dead givaway for a cine lens.

Its got an interchangable mount system (yet another!) unique to Tewe, the mount on this one interestingly is a T-mount - see photo above of the mount. I have seen others in various cine mounts and Nikon. The T-mount tells me that this one is probably from the later days of Tewe as these did not become common for other than Tamron until perhaps 1964-65. A T-mount is very handy on these things these days, else conversion from cine mounts could be quite a problem.

Its got a fairly close focus for this sort of thing, 7 meters/23 feet. The focus grip is certainly not meant for hand-holding, as it is very narrow and very unbalanced unless mounted on a sturdy tripod. Larger Tewe lenses interestingly had the Astro-type "steering wheel" focus grips. It came with its proper hood, which is a very good thing as this is a huge odd size, around 90mm.

Performance - well, I had a very difficult time with this. It pretty much insists on a tripod, as the helical, which is smooth enough when the thing is mounted as intended, binds terribly when it isn't, notwithstanding my efforts with grease. So the procedure of obtaining focus was slow.

As with most long-focus doublets, sharpness in the center is good even wide open, and there are no worries about contrast. Its got just a tiny bit of purple fringing - see some of the turtle shots. Not quite as sharp as it could be, as everything is at f/5, which on this sort of thing is mainly meant for accurate focusing. If I had gone down to f/5.6 or f/8 it would have been very crisp indeed.

IMGP1909bw by luisalegria, on Flickr

IMGP1742x by luisalegria, on Flickr

IMGP1690x by luisalegria, on Flickr

IMGP1365 by luisalegria, on Flickr

IMGP1478x by luisalegria, on Flickr

IMGP1634 by luisalegria, on Flickr

IMGP1675 by luisalegria, on Flickr

IMGP1851x by luisalegria, on Flickr

IMGP1882x by luisalegria, on Flickr

IMGP1876x by luisalegria, on Flickr

The bird -

IMGP1476 by luisalegria, on Flickr

Crop -

IMGP1476crop by luisalegria, on Flickr

[luisalegria]

And another Birns&Sawyer / Astra (or Tewe?) lens, a little bit bigger than mine -

http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2016/06/15/a-one-of-a-kind-monster-optic-nasa-commissioned-1000mm-f-4.5-lens-going-up

[kds315*]

not a dud it seems

Thanks for the detailed write up Luis!

[uddhava]

Interesting and impressive looking lens. Nice photos.
How heavy is the lens?

[luisalegria]

Weight is about 2 kilos

[exaklaus]

Very nice one!
Be carefull, this may end up in searching and collecting more TEWE lenses

[Marek]

Too late, I have just keyworded TEWE at my Ebay searches

[exaklaus]

Good luck, hope you will have enough space at your home!

[Marek]

That's exactly what I've just been PM'ing to the second Klaus: I don't.

But I still hope you to offer me some nice fast short adaptable Astro item one fine day (But please, not this Spring, my lendsiction went too much nuts already)

[Lloydy]

Very impressive pictures Luis, the lens has great character.