Photographica

[Mike Farley]

I have just spent an enjoyable day wandering around Photographica with a friend. In some ways, it is bit like a car boot sale although there are the usual exotica going for some high prices and some genuinely old cameras. There was a Gandolfi, for example, with a price tag of £2,500.

http://www.pccgb.net/photographica_fair.html

I had gone with the intention of just looking around, but my friend had other ideas, so I ended up with a Vivitar Series 1 70-210 which he spotted for me. It has obviously seen some use although it appears to be OK optically. Back in the day, this was a popular premium lens and would have cost a lot more than the tenner I laid out, even before taking the effects of inflation into account. The main problem is that it has a Nikon mount, a brand of camera that quite remarkably I do not own, which means that I could be spending much more on an adapter. With on sensor image stabilisation and focus peaking available on modern mirrorless cameras, old manual focus lenses are having something of a renaissance and the best examples from premium brands, such as Leica R optics, are seeing some significant price increases, having been in the doldrums not so long ago. For me, it is just as much fun finding a lens with a lesser reputation and trying it out.

It turns out that Vivitar did not actually make any of its lenses and subcontracted the manufacture to other companies which means there are five different variants of this lens dating from different periods. Mine seems to be the first version, produced by Kiron in 1984 some nine years after the lens was introduced if I understand the identification algorithm of the serial number correctly. The third version appears to have been the best, but any of the early ones are OK with the last two versions better avoided.

http://www.robertstech.com/vivitar.htm

[Mike Farley]

It seems that the Vivitar lens I purchased might be much older than I initially thought. Many of the articles about the lens on the Internet, and there are a surprising number of them*, refer to the Mark Roberts piece to which I also linked. This states that the year of introduction was 1975, but I have since found a number of reviews which are dated 1974 and even one for late 1973 on this website.

http://allphotolenses.com/lenses/item/c_507.html

The problem is that the year of manufacture is denoted by a single digit, 4 in this instance, and as I do not know how long Kiron manufactured the lens I cannot determine the decade. What I do know is that the Amateur Photographer review gives the price of the lens when new as £221-50, which would have been a premium price in 1974. The Pentax version was cheaper at £205-50, which seems surprising until you remember that the other mounts are of the bayonet type, whereas at the time Pentax were still using the M42 screw mount which it shared with some other manufacturers such as Practica and Zenith. The introduction of the current PK mount was still quite some way off in 1974.

Ain't photographic archaeology fascinating. One day I might even take a picture with this lens.

* Of which this thread becomes another.

[Nina]

Look forward to see in the picture Mike!

[Mike Farley]

Look forward to see in the picture Mike!

Is this what you mean, Nina, a couple of general views of Photographica in full swing?

[Nina]

Wow!
It is true what they say that a picture is worth a thousand words.
I did not mean that though, there is a typo in my message. I meant I look forward to seeing how your new/old lens performs.

[Mike Farley]

I did not mean that though, there is a typo in my message. I meant I look forward to seeing how your new/old lens performs.

How could I have misunderstood?

It will be a day or so before I get the necessary adapter to attach the lens to a camera. As I suspected, it will cost considerably more than the lens and there are not as many options as I thought there might be.