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Lomo lenses?

Alexander Waldman

Alexander Waldman

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So I've seen these Lomo lenses talked about quite a bit on the forums and I'm just trying to figure out what exactly they are... I searched the forum and el Goog to try and find out a bit more info but all I can tell is that some people like them, some don't, they're old, they're Russian (I think), and (at least some of them are) anamorphic. Oh, and they generally use a mount called Oct-19 (and apparently they're popular with the DSLR crowd). Curious that there's not even a wiki page on them. I've seen a few for sale here on Reduser, so apparently they're not terrible.

Can anyone tell me what exactly a Lomo is? Is it some sort of vintage Russian cine lens? Are they still being manufactured? Are they at all comparable to Zeiss, Cooke, Angie, Leica, none of the above? I absolutely love the series II/III Speed Panchros, but they're a bit out of my reach for now unless I'm renting them. Could a good Lomo zoom hold me off until I can get myself a couple of used Panchros?

Sorry for the long post, just trying to learn as much about them as I can! Thanks!
 
They were made in the USSR, as far as I can tell there were three companies making 35mm movie lenses there, LOMO, something called the 'Central Design Office', and I think something close to 'Linkonap' I don't have that one here to look at and its written in Cyrillic.

Most are quite good that we have, although the anamorphic need to be carefully fit to the camera they are used on since you cannot make up for the indifferent flange to focal distance with the focus control on the lens, there is a ring on the back of the lens that needs to be turned or shimmed to get the lens to focus to a point wide open.

OCT-19 is a direct copy of Mitchell BNC mount, they had several Mitchell BNC cameras that they made lenses for, and some sold OCT-19 are actually contaminated for BNC use. It was hard to maching the locking hole in the mount tab (that mitchell used) so they turned that into a slot, the slot would fit around the round pin in Mitchell cameras I think, well maybe to start with, but later they adjusted the flange to focal to round off to whole mm values and used a square pin in the slot on their newer cameras. So you can find lenses that were non-reflex that were made to fit BNC but look like OCT-19, and later lenses that were made like BNCR and don't focus right on a Mitchell.

OCT-18 is a bit like a cross between ARRI Standard and Eyemo lens mount, much as the american ARRI 1A copy Cineflex did, they seem to have altered the ARRI standard mount of WWII captured cameras so that Russian lenses would only fit Russian cameras like the Konvas.

I would say that some of the LOMO are very good, much like a cross between a Cooke Series I and a Schenider or Zeiss of WWII vintage, they probably got the lens prescriptions from the German lens companies after the war, as I was told by one dealer, the 28mm we got "was made with Zeiss Glass" in the early 1960's so they may have run off with some ingots of glass as well.

One 75mm f/1.5 we have from the 'Central Design Office' that seems to have made small runs of prototypes, is very sharp even wide open.

The 200mm is a bit soft though. And the 35mm f/1.4 looks like someone who did not know what they were doing worked on it because the focus marks are re-scratched and its a bit soft wide open, but looks good at T/2.8

Many of the lenses from the 1970's on are marked in T/ stops.

I've been looking for the f/1.0 50mm for years, but only saw a listing of it once, but was told it exists, but where? We have a f/1.2 50mm that is good for a lens of that speed but the T/ stop is not as fast as our f/1.1 B&L sample lens, it maybe T/1.35. Mostly I think because the glass has an odd greenish brown tint, not yellow or orange like high index glass used by cooke.

The only bad thing I have found is that some of the later lenses, like one model of 28mm retrofocus seems to have elements made of some crystal, maybe fluorite, and it seems to dissolve if you keep the lens in a damp place, making clear spots on the element, if you pack the lens in desiccant for 6 months and keep re-charging the desiccant the lens seems to go back to normal. If you take the lens appart to clean it and wipe off the spots, then you will probably ruin the lens because those elements seem to be water soluble (?) or at least very soft as lens tissue diped in Kodak lens cleaner seems to scratch the lens in a bad way. That is ONLY on some internal elements, if you look at them at angles you can see what look like fractures, but someone wrote someplace before that those are crystallization issues with the material made in USSR, and because of the angle of the rays they do not impact the lens function, although you can see them if you look through the lens at various angles.

I read in a Russian lens manual quote that the factory says to ONLY use "purified gasoline and natural cotton lint" to clean the lenses, so that must be some kind of warning NOT to use water based lens cleaner. I don't know where you get 'purified gasoline' outside the USSR for use as lens cleaner?!

So after one lens went bad, we now keep all of them in air tight containers with desiccant unless they are being used. It probably does not impact the early lenses like before the mid-1970's when they started growing optical crystals in the USSR, maybe. Use of such optical crystals can allow for superior resolution and CA correction, but not so good for damp environments. Glass used in lenses made in the USA are normally tested for stability and durability in damp air. I'm making the issue sound worse that it is maybe, in San Francisco everything is damp most of the time, maybe more so because we don't have the heater on to save money.

Most optical glass is mostly made of various salts, with some glass holding it together. Astro Berlin lenses of the 1920's we have tend to get a surface fog from dampness, as some of the salt gets lifted by moisture. So its not just a Russian lens issue, we had a Cooke Series I 24mm that also had some white film on its elements, but that does clean off with water based cleaner. Best to keep all lenses dry as you can for the most part.

If you can you should get the lenses on 60 day approval, with refund minus 15% re-stocking fee so you can test them as you don't know who has been working on them or swapping elements since they left the factory 30 to 50 years ago...
 
Alexander Waldman said:
Could a good Lomo zoom hold me off until I can get myself a couple of used Panchros?
Sorry for the long post, just trying to learn as much about them as I can! Thanks!
Click to expand...

Dan did a great job breaking all things Lomo down... so no need to go over any ground there :)

You ask if a 'good' Lomo zoom can hold you off... well, it depends what you're shooting (and what you're shooting on!)... and I presume you're talking spherical (not Ana)?

If you're shooting 4K, the cheap Foton zoom (37-140) at about T4.5 isn't going to be worth it ) but can be good for 1080. I have two - and one is soooo much better than the other, so it's the luck of the draw. I have a 20-120 that's really nice and I prefer it's look to the primes I have (but that's just personal)... but it is heavy 3.5kg.

In terms of other zooms, there are a lot of old and heavy 70's lomo zooms being sold at the moment... they're cheap... but massive - and heavy (5kg or 8kg depending on size - so you have to build good supports and forget about any H/H with them!) - and, if you have problems, they're often not worth fixing.

Don't forget mechanically, they're old and whilst some are built like battleships, others are not!

It really depends on what you've been looking at??? :)

You might be better with a BT RED zoom - it depends on your budget - and patience with antique lenses.
 
Wow, thanks everyone for the response! Dan, I really appreciate you taking the time to write all of that down...I've been searching for a summary like that for ages! Rob, I will be sending you a PM soon, so check your inbox in a few hours.

Andy, I do narrative work with a fairly large crew and shooting all 4k with mostly 2k and 1080 delivery. Size and weight really aren't a big issue for me, and everything I've shot so far has been spherical. Most of the productions I'm on rent Standard Speeds or Superspeeds, but I'd like to start building my own collection of actual cine glass and it seems like lomos are a good place to start.

I've seen a ton of stuff on here shot with anamorphic lomos, and I dig the look. Sharp, but still organic. I'm thinking spherical lomos have a fairly comparable look? Again, I've never shot ana before so I don't really have much of an idea. Can anyone comment on ana vs. spherical lomos?
 
Sphericals have a certain look and can be really clear/clean with nice bokeh.

The Ana's produce the 'look' most people link with the word 'Lomo' (in cine circles, anyway ;) - the creamy look, ovular bokeh etc.

You won't get a look that's directly comparable to Ana's from sphericals... you can get milky/creamy... but not 100% the way the Ana's work (as, don't forget that, the image expands outwards to the edge of frame, it's often softening as it reaches the corners of the glass), but you do get the chance to frame in an epic way and play with negative space more - as a 35mm as a horizontal FOV of approx 17.5mm and a vertical FOV 35mm, so you frame more 'in-camera' for the look you want.

A lot of this look is due to the fact that Ana's (in either the more sophisticated 'roundfront' or the lower tech 'squarefront' types) use multiple lenses to achieve the optical anamorphic squeeze... and these lenses have 'magical' coatings ;)

But, with the options to grade raw footage now, you should be able to get a look that's similar... just minus some of the more obvious ana aberrations and ovular bokeh.

You won't get the ovular bokeh or as much cream shooting with a zoom that uses a rear anamorphic adapter, as they're simply squeezing the spherical image - you'll need to use Squarefronts or Roundfronts for that.

Ana's also breathe a lot more - the Squares often suffer from severe 'anamorphic mumps' and you really don't want many complex pull focus shots.

Really, it depends on your style of shooting and what you're looking to add :)
 
If you can find the super speed russian lenses that bear a "CKBK" or "MKBK" or "Ekran" insignia, they're great lenses, the best of the Russian lot, infinitely better than the standard lomos. It's often quite confusing what you're buying or looking at because the lenses get cannibalized, serial numbers get scratched off, housings get swapped around -- it's kind of a mess, so be careful if you're shopping.

The CKBK's and Ekrans are like Leica R's but more smooth and dreamy and painterly. If you like Leica R's, you'll like these, but you may feel the tradeoff is something ocularly less 'precise' - Leica R's are more buttoned down, less flare, etc. I have a complete set of these in super speed T1.5, all late model stuff from the early 90's and I love them to death, use them all the time. The 18, 28, 35, 50 and 75 are all top notch. The 25-80 T3 zoom is a really astounding piece of glass and an incredibly useful zoom at the focal length it's at. Very light and compact, nothing else like it around. The 50-150 zoom is another total gem. They even made a few 1000mm lenses for apparently filming rocket launches, these are much older, I think, but quite interesting to use. There were a lot of specialty lenses like this that you used to be able to find on ebay years ago, but they all got snarfed up.

I did a ton of music videos with these lenses on 35mm using the Konvas 8M. Shot a lot of stuff with Matt Uhry, who is also on here and uses his set of Russian lenses on his Epic now. I use mine on different camera systems and can't wait to use them on the Scarlet incoming... I think if Matt chimes in he'd agree with the Leica comparison but perhaps be able to offer another take.

If you go to michaelpalmieri.com, ther are some good examples of these lenses in action. Look under 'music videos' and check out the bravery, the new pornographers, belle and sebastian, and marjorie fair. Go under 'commercials' and look up converse. Those are all almost exclusively the CKBK lenses and maybe a lomo or two in there for shots where we didn't know if the lens would survive the take. :)

Also this link below uses the 1000mm lens a lot, sorry it's a really old quicktime encode, if anyone's interested in higher quality on it i can repost it. They're the only examples I know of using that lens since only a few were made. I have one gathering dust in the garage... It's just too damn heavy:

http://www.michaelpalmieri.com/ARCHIVE/musicvideos/vacation_destituteprostitutes.mov
 
If I am trying to buy some Lomos, then my advice to you is that they are the worst lenses and a terrible investment. However, if I am trying to sell my Lomos, then nothing short of MPs will compare. :)

Seriously, Dan's post has some good info, but was only partially correct: 'Linkonap' (which is really Lenkinap"as in Leningrad - where the factory was located), and LOMO are the same factory, but with a name change between the 50s and 60s. Also, BNCR and OCT mounts are not exactly the same. For example, the outside diameter, as well as the spacing and length of the flanges are different. There is a .5mm difference in the FFD. And there is the slot vs pin hole that Dan mentioned. While I am here, the BNCR and OCT19 mounts are superior to PL mounts in terms of their strength. So heavy lenses, such as the old Lomos made from solid brass, or the big bazooka that Nick mentioned, are less of an issue unsupported. Whereas the same weight lens with a PL mount might raise an eyebrow if unsupported. (Not a PL hater, its just simple physics and mechanics)

Russian glass is really too big of a topic to put in a single post/thread and, you are enlarging the discussion by crossing topics. For example you are disscussing different mounts (there were at least 4 Russian mounts), different manufacturers, different vintages, different optical designs (some focal lengths had over a dozen different designs over time 30 years), and spherical vs ana - all within the umbrella discussion of Russian cine lenses. And there were also different lens housing styles based on the camera the lens was sold with.

Behind the Iron Curtain a substantial independent film industry flourished in Russia. They made some damn good lenses, cameras, and films. However, because of the political, geographical, and language barriers, and the fact that they are no longer made, knowledge of their gear requires effort. There is lots of good info on Reduser, and on the net in general. There are whole web sites devoted to it. This thread has some info, but you really need to do a lot of research. I, for example, posted a very very long diatribe about Russian lens nomenclature - something you should know before you set off buying lenses. Type LOMO in Reduser's search button.

And as far as prices go, there was a set of LOMO primes that sold on Ebay today for $1600. Hella bargain. Very few are sold via Reduser.
 
It's tempting to lump Russian lenses all together but it would be a huge mistake. Different factories, different cities, different era's.... I'm going to go out on a limb and offer my understanding of what the factories were and what you can anticipate from various lenses.

The higher end stuff from the 80's and 90's ( mostly the first 2 digits of the serial # is the year it was made ) and anything CKBK is very worth checking out. Zoom wise the 25-80 and 20-120 can be good if well maintained. The 20-120 has a very useful macro function and a sweet anamorphic back.

You'll see some crazy one off stuff too... Might be amazing. A friend has a 50-150 that's a T2.2 for instance and fricking sharp.

Probably best to avoid the Foton Zoom and I would only mess with the standard speed Lomo's if they recent vintage and were in great shape. Also probably best to avoid thing on the OCT -18 mount which is kind of fussy and flimsy.

OCT-19 is rock solid Burly and much like BNCR

Wider Lomo's and CKBK may have coverage issues on 5k, everything above 35mm that I've tried is OK. Everything is fine on 4k for Scarlet.


More Recently 90's - Current

Optar Illumina's Many 16mm format speed primes and a few 35mm sets. Now out of business.

Ekran I think this is a post glasnost re-brand of CKBK, now out of business. CKBK = Good

Lomo, Moscow Makes the Illumina Super Speeds

Elite, St Petersburg, Makes Optica Elites, Elite Anamorphics and A selection of zooms. I co-own a set of their high speed primes and am very happy with them.

Anyway - I hope this enlightens more than it confuses. I Intend to do some shootouts with the Elites and the Leica's and the CKBKS...Maybe a few others when I get some time.

Matt Uhry
www.mattuhry.com
 
OK, I'm interested.

Has anyone tested the later f/2 CKBK (Lomo? Ekran?) lenses on Epic or Scarlet 5K? Could be an interesting set for a vintage look... If they have usable coverage.

18 mm F2.0 35 OKS-10-18-1
22 mm F2.0 35 OKS-6-22-1
28 mm F2.0 35 OKS-11-28-1
35 mm F2.0 35 OKS-16-35-1
50 mm F2.0 35 OKS-13-50-1
75 mm F2.0 35 OKS-17-75-1
 
I recently picked up a LOMO Foton zoom for pretty cheap via eBay and finally got to put it on an Epic with it today.
Some images:
6798663353_52491181da_z.jpg


6798686139_35da469a7f_z.jpg


6798690237_e8c69d1027_z.jpg


6798667279_bebb063185_z.jpg

(the above two are, obviously, crops)

6798675003_e5466ceacd_z.jpg
 
So if the third one from the top is not cropped it seems to me pretty sharp in the corners. What are you stopped down to?
 
The Foton is a nice little zoom. It's small & lightweight and has a decent range (37-140) - downside is it's T4.2-T16, minimum focus of 1.5m and needs to be de-clicked.

These lenses have an average reputation... but a good specimen can produce really nice results (although not as tack-sharp as modern lenses), however the softness can be appealing to diffuse the digital look.

IMO, they're a great lens for outside shooting and controlled interior lighting set-ups (certainly if you plan to light in the T8 range). I wouldn't necessarily want to shoot wide open, as they do get softer at T4.2.

But I've not tested on an Epic - so Keith's shots are interesting. :)

Glad I've already got a couple, as I have a feeling people might start re-discovering these lenses and prices will start to increase :)
 
Rick LaLonde said:
So if the third one from the top is not cropped it seems to me pretty sharp in the corners. What are you stopped down to?
Click to expand...

The third and fourth ones down are cropped. In those exteriors I was stopped down to a T16.
 
Didn't want to start a new thread for this, so hope this is the right place.

Does anyone know where I can get Lomo's serviced in North America? I don't mind paying dearly for good work, and would rather not have to ship overseas since I'm shooting every week and can't spare too much of my kit at one time!

I just need a general checkup, and grease job. Pretty much exactly what I get when I go to the doctor myself.
 
Last edited:
Focus Optics in LA.
 
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