Nikon F2 with Astro-Berlin 1000mm f6.3
Got a dive into photo history for you today. A customer walked into the shop yesterday with their newly-acquired Astro-Berlin 1000mm f6.3 Fernbildlinse. Naturally we had to get a photo of it for sharing and then we were curious to know more about the history of this lens.
Despite what its Astro-Berlin name might suggest, this lens was designed mostly with cine photography in mind. Astro-Berlin was a specialty lens company founded in Germany as Astro-Gesellschaft Bielicke & Co in the early 1920s. Its founders were initially very interested in astrophotography and initially designed lenses to suit that purpose but they soon expanded to focus on cine, still, aerial and other specialty scientific purposes as well. They became known for making lenses that typically had very fast maximum apertures, very long focal lengths, or both. A couple of examples include this 1000mm f6.3, a 75mm f0.95 (that covered 18x24mm half-frame), and a 150mm f1.8. Astro-Berlin adapted many of these lenses to various camera mounts, mostly between 35mm and 6x6 medium format. This Astro-Berlin has a native M39 lens mount but currently is fitted with a Nikon F lens adapter. We threw the Nikon F2 on there for scale.
Optically-speaking, they are very simple lenses. This 1000mm f6.3 apparently has a design of just two optics. It should be of little surprise then that they are not known for high levels of performance. They are prone to aberrations, lower contrast and softer image edges. Despite that, they are still something else to behold.
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