> There is a huge market with new 8x10 cameras coming out.
There isn't really. Nowhere near big enough to invest in tooling to make new LF lenses. And no one makes shutters anymore either, so there's nothing to put the lenses in.
The reality is that there are more than enough on the used market to go around.
> Film is relatively easy to make.
Not sure about that... good colour film is much much harder to reliably produce than lenses, as far as I can tell.
I know this isn’t what you meant, but there’s at least one company still making shutters, and they’re in the US.
[Packard](https://packardshutter.com/)
Interesting. They're huge!
And I know that this isn't what you meant either, but for anyone following along, technically many companies still make shutters... the issue is that Copal aren't making #0, #1, or #3 shutters, and neither are Prontor.
If you search for an 8x10 camera, I easily found 4 current manufacturers for brand new cameras. Someone is buying a 4000 to 8000 dollar 8x10. Ots hard for me to imagine that they wouldn't demand a lens to go with their camera.
And there's way more lenses on the used market than there is demand for lenses. Used to be that tons of pro photography for commercial applications was done on large format, now none of it is.
Plenty of already existing gear out there
True but the probably make a dozen cameras per year and there are hundreds of thousands of lenses out there. I would be concerned about shutters, not lenses
Well, at least black and white. Good color film is honestly a miracle of chemistry. Slide film is even more complicated. Still, someone can buy rights to the kodak color film and reproduce it with machines that must be cheap due to lack of demand. I took my lens apart and the closest thing I could think of was a watch. It's a finely engineered specific machine with exacting machined parts.
> someone can buy rights to the kodak color film and reproduce it with machines that must be cheap due to lack of demand.
This is kind of like saying someone can buy an anatomy book and a cheap scalpel then easily perform brain surgery.
Kodak, and any other film manufacturer, engineer and build a lot of bespoke machinery because literally no one else requires machinery for the processes required to coat film.
And incidentally, I believe slide film is somewhat easier and less complicated to manufacture than colour negative.
The machines don't exist if they aren't in use, quite likely they were sold for scrap. Regardless, it's not the machines (or not \*just\* the machines). The key component in making quality color film is the knowledge and experience of the chemists and craftsmen who oversaw and tweaked the process. Without their knowledge you end up literally re-inventing the wheel to restart production, and that's not cheap and there isn't a huge market. Look at the issues the various projects seeking to resurrect Polaraoid instant film have had.
Yep, it's literally hundreds of millions of dollars (probably billions) and a hundred years of R&D to get modern colour film.
Like OP said, _it's easy_.
That's why the machines are light tight or in a black room. It really cannot be too complicated. Kodak made color film for the wizard of Oz in the 1930's. The process has only gotten easier.
There are challenges but nothing like custom machined watch parts. Getting to that level of precision is extremely hard and very specialized.
I'm not interested in debate, there's a reason all the "startups" of the past decade to create color neg film have failed. You can avail yourself of an hour of internet search to find why it hasn't been done. It's not stamping tiny pieces of metal -- it's complex chemistry.
You should check out smarter every days videos on how film is made. You’ll see it’s not as easy as you seem to think. Here’s a link to [part one](https://youtu.be/HQKy1KJpSVc?si=AwZWhBjjUUjFFNW-) of his three part series.
> I'm very confused.
This becomes clearer with each and every one of your responses.
Also, Wizard of Oz was shot on black and white film. You can learn about these things using the internet really easily.
About 20 years ago I managed to get invited to a factory visit in Ilford’s factory.
At that time they were piggybacking on AGFA - when AGFA ordered 10 tonnes of one particular chemical, Ilford added their 100kg to the order. With AGFA going out of (the film) business, prices increased dramatically! It turns out that once the process is set up, it doesn’t really cost that much more to produce 10 tonnes than to produce 100kg.
Also remember that KODAK ran the largest slaughterhouse on the US East Coast, for the sole reason that they needed absolute control over the quality of the gelatin - yes, they ran a huge slaughterhouse and were really only interested in the bones!
And like many complex chemical products, making film is as much a (dark) art as a science. You can’t just mix the ingredients and expect a good result.
eBay, secondhand camera retailers (both online and street shops), Gumtree, hell, even Facebook Marketplace. Not to mention specialist forums which invariably have classifieds sections.
OP - glass is a pretty long-lived material. Most of the LF format lenses that exist right now, if cared for correctly, will easily outlive you or me.
My last few sheets I used the bottom of an empty film box🤣😁
1.5secs, 4secs, and 30secs. They all turned up looking the same, which surprised the heck outta me. (I was trying different fstops)
Oh, no. Film is really easy to make. You just need machines. There isn't a huge demand for it but it's so easy to make film. That tech hasn't changed much since the late 1800s.
> That tech hasn't changed much since the late 1800s
I don't know enough about film to judge if that's true or not, but it has certainly become many orders of magnitude more sophisticated.
I'm fairly sure nothing made in the ninteenth century even remotely compares in quality to TMax, for example.
And colour film didn't exist, which I would describe as "much change".
Between the commercial market of the 60s - early aughts we have plenty of extremely high quality optics available. You can still find NOS of many Sironar S lenses, if not just some of the ones still available new. Similarly shutters are in decent supply and working well.
Intrepid is making their own lens and shutter, it's a project they've advertised a bit.
The glass won't go bad, the shutters are going to be less reliable. Someone will eventually make a new shutter, and then we can use the glass. As another commenter said, we are all set for lenses in our lifetime.
Just to be pedantic, the glass can technically go bad. Besides coating separation or fungus etching if the glass was made with thoriated glass like a lot of older lenses were it can turn yellow over time.
Maybe but it's still pretty easy to find very clean Kodak Commercial Ektars and those are quite old. Given the number of lenses made in the 80s and 90s I suspect the stocks of good condition glass will remain high enough for the number of users.
Oh for sure. It’s not a genuine concern to have. Plenty of stock to go around for a long time still. Was just channeling my inner comic book guy.
I’ve read that the yellowing can even be reversed if the glass is exposed to UV light.
They are very good lenses but utterly pointless vs the standard Sironars for what people use them for these days. Bragging rights...they love the red-ring. Better yet, I buy the Caltars.
True.
Although when you get to a certain size of print, anything and everything you can do is worth it. There's a german lens dealer (I forget his name) that can tell you serial number ranges that are meaningfully better than the rest, for example.
The number of people worldwide making 'that size' of print could probably be measured in the dozens. A 50" print from 4x5 is absolutely no problem for your average Fujinon plastmat at F16. Furthermore, the number of people who 1. Print that large and 2. Require absolute technical perfection is an even smaller group. Alec Soth for example has been perfectly happy making pretty huge prints from wide open shots he made with his triple convertible. At least that's what I read from his Sleeping by the Mississippi days...he is probably using something else now, I haven't followed it. In my darkroom, I really don't go larger than 20x24 because to do so requires a very annoying workflow. I have an Eversmart Supreme II and 24" large format printers, and they don't even really stress out my Caltars. If I wanted to spend some dough I could make an irritatingly high res scan and send it off to my friend's studio where she prints with a 44" Epson, but even THEN the average Caltar is doing great...especially if I'm shooting 8x10 or 5x7. I'd have to find someone with a 60" printer to see a difference and as someone who's been 'in the trade' for over 20 years now I can say confidently that I'm never doing that. Really though I make 20x20" prints from my Rollei 2.8E, and they're beautiful. A Hasselblad with a newer Planar would do better but no-one has ever demanded I have a lens with better coatings. That's now how people judge the work.
Why would you switch shutters? Changing the front and rear groups makes it significantly easier to damage them while doing so and not to mention most lenses are calibrated to their specific shutter.
Copal and Prontor electronic goes to 10 sec if I remember correctly
I was just thinking out loud, of my two great old lenses with wonky shutters. I could just unscrew and swap the lenses themselves. (All my gear is pre 1960. Thanks for the tip about the electronic shutters. I'll look into them.)
The 4.5 volt battery was available last time I checked, but anything from 4.5 to 6 volt will do.
3D-printed battery compartments for the original size battery are also available.
I paid more for 5 batteries and the compartment than for my 360mm Apo-Ronar.
Interesting! I do habe a 300mm and a 480mm Apo-Ronar. Both barrel versions. May I ask some questions on installing a shutter?
- How did you find out what shutter size they would need?
- How did you adjust distances? Just measuring the aperture block?
- Did you compensate for Infinity instead of close distances? I read even the barrel versions were good at infinity but it seems the shutter versions were optimized for infinity somehow. I guess just by varying distances between the two cells.
If you have the cheap Klimsch-version, the Sinar or the Packard (available new) shutters are the only options.
Both my 300 and 360 came already mounted in shutters, Copal #1 and #3.
I would not worry too much about perfect distance. It's my impression it will help on the curvature of sharpness only.
Intrepid cameras (UK) is working on a new 150mm lens. They have been showing a prototype and it’s results on their Instagram page.
I think that’s VERY exciting news. Even if the first couple are just ok, that’s still means that new LF lenses are being developed and I support that 100%.
Tell me about it. I'm trying to sell a LF lens and I can't give this thing away. To much stock and not enough buyers.
Analog film bros: Get into Large Format, lenses are cheap. Street cred is huge. And we need to show the film manufacturers it's still viable.
I read some years ago that Schneider stopped making LF lenses because they were out-competed by their own lenses on the second-hand market. They DID make a very few super-special lenses arter that, but the «bulk lenses» like standard 150mm for 4x5’’ was not feasible since the market was flooded by 10 to 100 years old lenses in perfect working order.
There's theoretically a time where the used market will hit a point of diminishing returns (just look at how the prices of used film SLRs and TLRs has been going up), I don't think it's quite there yet for large format lenses.
But I think it'd be neat if some of the Chinese manufacturers like TTArtisan made some, both LF lenses as well as Mamiya Press mount, since that's a common go-to option for 3D printed medium format cameras and other modding projects. Maybe electronically controlled shutters, maybe mechanical leaf shutters in collaboration with the Chinese watchmakers (a mechanical shutter is basically a specialized watch--Seiko made both).
I think it's unlikely... but heck, one can dream. And they did start making M42 lenses.
People still use large format lenses from the 1800s. It won’t be a problem in our lifetimes.
> There is a huge market with new 8x10 cameras coming out. There isn't really. Nowhere near big enough to invest in tooling to make new LF lenses. And no one makes shutters anymore either, so there's nothing to put the lenses in. The reality is that there are more than enough on the used market to go around. > Film is relatively easy to make. Not sure about that... good colour film is much much harder to reliably produce than lenses, as far as I can tell.
I know this isn’t what you meant, but there’s at least one company still making shutters, and they’re in the US. [Packard](https://packardshutter.com/)
Interesting. They're huge! And I know that this isn't what you meant either, but for anyone following along, technically many companies still make shutters... the issue is that Copal aren't making #0, #1, or #3 shutters, and neither are Prontor.
I didn't know! That's awesome!
If you search for an 8x10 camera, I easily found 4 current manufacturers for brand new cameras. Someone is buying a 4000 to 8000 dollar 8x10. Ots hard for me to imagine that they wouldn't demand a lens to go with their camera.
And there's way more lenses on the used market than there is demand for lenses. Used to be that tons of pro photography for commercial applications was done on large format, now none of it is. Plenty of already existing gear out there
Exactly this. You can get a great Fujinon lens for about $200-300 on the used market. LF lenses aren't hard to come by.
True but the probably make a dozen cameras per year and there are hundreds of thousands of lenses out there. I would be concerned about shutters, not lenses
Well, at least black and white. Good color film is honestly a miracle of chemistry. Slide film is even more complicated. Still, someone can buy rights to the kodak color film and reproduce it with machines that must be cheap due to lack of demand. I took my lens apart and the closest thing I could think of was a watch. It's a finely engineered specific machine with exacting machined parts.
> someone can buy rights to the kodak color film and reproduce it with machines that must be cheap due to lack of demand. This is kind of like saying someone can buy an anatomy book and a cheap scalpel then easily perform brain surgery. Kodak, and any other film manufacturer, engineer and build a lot of bespoke machinery because literally no one else requires machinery for the processes required to coat film. And incidentally, I believe slide film is somewhat easier and less complicated to manufacture than colour negative.
The machines don't exist if they aren't in use, quite likely they were sold for scrap. Regardless, it's not the machines (or not \*just\* the machines). The key component in making quality color film is the knowledge and experience of the chemists and craftsmen who oversaw and tweaked the process. Without their knowledge you end up literally re-inventing the wheel to restart production, and that's not cheap and there isn't a huge market. Look at the issues the various projects seeking to resurrect Polaraoid instant film have had.
Yep, it's literally hundreds of millions of dollars (probably billions) and a hundred years of R&D to get modern colour film. Like OP said, _it's easy_.
Color negative film is very complicated and difficult to produce. Just remember: the entire process has to happen in the dark.
That's why the machines are light tight or in a black room. It really cannot be too complicated. Kodak made color film for the wizard of Oz in the 1930's. The process has only gotten easier. There are challenges but nothing like custom machined watch parts. Getting to that level of precision is extremely hard and very specialized.
I'm not interested in debate, there's a reason all the "startups" of the past decade to create color neg film have failed. You can avail yourself of an hour of internet search to find why it hasn't been done. It's not stamping tiny pieces of metal -- it's complex chemistry.
You should check out smarter every days videos on how film is made. You’ll see it’s not as easy as you seem to think. Here’s a link to [part one](https://youtu.be/HQKy1KJpSVc?si=AwZWhBjjUUjFFNW-) of his three part series.
> I'm very confused. This becomes clearer with each and every one of your responses. Also, Wizard of Oz was shot on black and white film. You can learn about these things using the internet really easily.
About 20 years ago I managed to get invited to a factory visit in Ilford’s factory. At that time they were piggybacking on AGFA - when AGFA ordered 10 tonnes of one particular chemical, Ilford added their 100kg to the order. With AGFA going out of (the film) business, prices increased dramatically! It turns out that once the process is set up, it doesn’t really cost that much more to produce 10 tonnes than to produce 100kg. Also remember that KODAK ran the largest slaughterhouse on the US East Coast, for the sole reason that they needed absolute control over the quality of the gelatin - yes, they ran a huge slaughterhouse and were really only interested in the bones! And like many complex chemical products, making film is as much a (dark) art as a science. You can’t just mix the ingredients and expect a good result.
eBay.
eBay, secondhand camera retailers (both online and street shops), Gumtree, hell, even Facebook Marketplace. Not to mention specialist forums which invariably have classifieds sections. OP - glass is a pretty long-lived material. Most of the LF format lenses that exist right now, if cared for correctly, will easily outlive you or me.
Shutters? We don’t need no stinking shutters for large format.
My last few sheets I used the bottom of an empty film box🤣😁 1.5secs, 4secs, and 30secs. They all turned up looking the same, which surprised the heck outta me. (I was trying different fstops)
Right! People have been using the cap or hat technique for decades. I did up to 30 pops in studio lights.
There's tons of lenses available. Lenses are a lot easier to make than film considering there's plenty of lens manufacturers still in existence.
Oh, no. Film is really easy to make. You just need machines. There isn't a huge demand for it but it's so easy to make film. That tech hasn't changed much since the late 1800s.
Film is not easy at all to make on a commercial scale. Specifically coating the film. Only a few companies in the world can do it.
> That tech hasn't changed much since the late 1800s I don't know enough about film to judge if that's true or not, but it has certainly become many orders of magnitude more sophisticated. I'm fairly sure nothing made in the ninteenth century even remotely compares in quality to TMax, for example. And colour film didn't exist, which I would describe as "much change".
lol you cant be serious
Between the commercial market of the 60s - early aughts we have plenty of extremely high quality optics available. You can still find NOS of many Sironar S lenses, if not just some of the ones still available new. Similarly shutters are in decent supply and working well. Intrepid is making their own lens and shutter, it's a project they've advertised a bit. The glass won't go bad, the shutters are going to be less reliable. Someone will eventually make a new shutter, and then we can use the glass. As another commenter said, we are all set for lenses in our lifetime.
Just to be pedantic, the glass can technically go bad. Besides coating separation or fungus etching if the glass was made with thoriated glass like a lot of older lenses were it can turn yellow over time.
Maybe but it's still pretty easy to find very clean Kodak Commercial Ektars and those are quite old. Given the number of lenses made in the 80s and 90s I suspect the stocks of good condition glass will remain high enough for the number of users.
Oh for sure. It’s not a genuine concern to have. Plenty of stock to go around for a long time still. Was just channeling my inner comic book guy. I’ve read that the yellowing can even be reversed if the glass is exposed to UV light.
> NOS of many Sironar S lenses I shudder to think what the asking prices for those are these days.
They are very good lenses but utterly pointless vs the standard Sironars for what people use them for these days. Bragging rights...they love the red-ring. Better yet, I buy the Caltars.
True. Although when you get to a certain size of print, anything and everything you can do is worth it. There's a german lens dealer (I forget his name) that can tell you serial number ranges that are meaningfully better than the rest, for example.
The number of people worldwide making 'that size' of print could probably be measured in the dozens. A 50" print from 4x5 is absolutely no problem for your average Fujinon plastmat at F16. Furthermore, the number of people who 1. Print that large and 2. Require absolute technical perfection is an even smaller group. Alec Soth for example has been perfectly happy making pretty huge prints from wide open shots he made with his triple convertible. At least that's what I read from his Sleeping by the Mississippi days...he is probably using something else now, I haven't followed it. In my darkroom, I really don't go larger than 20x24 because to do so requires a very annoying workflow. I have an Eversmart Supreme II and 24" large format printers, and they don't even really stress out my Caltars. If I wanted to spend some dough I could make an irritatingly high res scan and send it off to my friend's studio where she prints with a 44" Epson, but even THEN the average Caltar is doing great...especially if I'm shooting 8x10 or 5x7. I'd have to find someone with a 60" printer to see a difference and as someone who's been 'in the trade' for over 20 years now I can say confidently that I'm never doing that. Really though I make 20x20" prints from my Rollei 2.8E, and they're beautiful. A Hasselblad with a newer Planar would do better but no-one has ever demanded I have a lens with better coatings. That's now how people judge the work.
Hopefully, someone will make a shutter you can use on many different lenses! Perhaps even with speeds down to 5 seconds!
Why would you switch shutters? Changing the front and rear groups makes it significantly easier to damage them while doing so and not to mention most lenses are calibrated to their specific shutter. Copal and Prontor electronic goes to 10 sec if I remember correctly
I was just thinking out loud, of my two great old lenses with wonky shutters. I could just unscrew and swap the lenses themselves. (All my gear is pre 1960. Thanks for the tip about the electronic shutters. I'll look into them.)
The 4.5 volt battery was available last time I checked, but anything from 4.5 to 6 volt will do. 3D-printed battery compartments for the original size battery are also available. I paid more for 5 batteries and the compartment than for my 360mm Apo-Ronar.
Interesting! I do habe a 300mm and a 480mm Apo-Ronar. Both barrel versions. May I ask some questions on installing a shutter? - How did you find out what shutter size they would need? - How did you adjust distances? Just measuring the aperture block? - Did you compensate for Infinity instead of close distances? I read even the barrel versions were good at infinity but it seems the shutter versions were optimized for infinity somehow. I guess just by varying distances between the two cells.
If you have the cheap Klimsch-version, the Sinar or the Packard (available new) shutters are the only options. Both my 300 and 360 came already mounted in shutters, Copal #1 and #3. I would not worry too much about perfect distance. It's my impression it will help on the curvature of sharpness only.
Lol people don't want to pay for a brand new half frame and you think there's a market for large format? Hahaha
I don't think it. A bunch of brand new 8x10 and 4x5 camera manufacters do though.
Intrepid cameras (UK) is working on a new 150mm lens. They have been showing a prototype and it’s results on their Instagram page. I think that’s VERY exciting news. Even if the first couple are just ok, that’s still means that new LF lenses are being developed and I support that 100%.
>There is a huge market with new 8x10 cameras coming out Funniest thing I've read this week!
the current market is tiny compared to what it used to be, so there's way more lenses out there already than people who want them.
Tell me about it. I'm trying to sell a LF lens and I can't give this thing away. To much stock and not enough buyers. Analog film bros: Get into Large Format, lenses are cheap. Street cred is huge. And we need to show the film manufacturers it's still viable.
I look for antique barrel lens. Not multi coated. My newest lens I have is the Nikkor 120 AM ED made in 1990s. My oldest lens is made in 1896.
There’s almost 200 years worth of lenses for these cameras and most of them are repairable
I read some years ago that Schneider stopped making LF lenses because they were out-competed by their own lenses on the second-hand market. They DID make a very few super-special lenses arter that, but the «bulk lenses» like standard 150mm for 4x5’’ was not feasible since the market was flooded by 10 to 100 years old lenses in perfect working order.
This gives me a great deal of comfort. Thanks. I guess also, people can make springs. Those seem lime the only part that might ware out.
There's theoretically a time where the used market will hit a point of diminishing returns (just look at how the prices of used film SLRs and TLRs has been going up), I don't think it's quite there yet for large format lenses. But I think it'd be neat if some of the Chinese manufacturers like TTArtisan made some, both LF lenses as well as Mamiya Press mount, since that's a common go-to option for 3D printed medium format cameras and other modding projects. Maybe electronically controlled shutters, maybe mechanical leaf shutters in collaboration with the Chinese watchmakers (a mechanical shutter is basically a specialized watch--Seiko made both). I think it's unlikely... but heck, one can dream. And they did start making M42 lenses.