In the midst of having the building painted this week, I was able to finish up work on and photograph the Super Baltar lenses I posted about earlier this month. There are now three sets of these much sought after vintage cinema lenses available for sale on cinemagear.com. Two of the sets contain the 20mm, 25mm, 35mm, 50mm, 75mm and 100mm focal lengths, and the third set is missing the 100mm. All of the lenses have been cleaned, serviced, and collimated. The Bausch & Lomb Super Baltar series of lenses ushered in a new era of optical design when they were introduced in the early 1960s. They carried on the legacy of the world renowned Baltar lenses that shot many classic Hollywood feature films of the 1940s and 50s. In contemporary advertising, Bausch & Lomb touted their new and superior glass-making technology, and a new optical design that attained negligible coma and spherical aberration. All of the elements are anti-reflective coated, and the new focusing design moves the optical assembly in a straight line along the optical axis without the elements rotating as the earlier classic Baltar lenses did. The f-stop controls were redesigned so that there is the same amount of rotation between f-stops on all of the focal lengths. All of the lenses also feature focus and f stop gears, as well as f and T stop engravings. I have only personally shot with Super Baltars on one feature film and I found them to have a similar look to the standard Baltars, but sharper, faster, and with better color reproduction. Check them all out here: https://bit.ly/3wL5fx3
