I saw an online auction site the sale of a Hasselblad Zeiss Planar 110mm f2 lens. It was being sold by a German seller and the price they were asking for it was much less than the Japanese dealers. However, there was a reason for the low price. This lens is stuck wide open and would need repair.
The seller was open to offers and I wasn’t expecting my £250 less than the asking price to be accepted. They accepted it pretty quickly and I now regret not asking for more off. I wish that I had as there is an additional bill of £165 by the courier company for the import due to the UK being out of the EU.
Why buy a broken lens you ask? Well, I have seen in forums and elsewhere that it is a well known problem for this lens to get stuck. My thinking is why pay for a lens at double the price if there is a high chance of it breaking in the future. I’m going to be shooting wide open most of the time so wouldn’t really be stopping it down. Besides, I have the 150mm f4 if I needed a smaller aperture.
I have no idea how much it will cost to repair and won’t investigate it until things are a bit more normal.
Still haven’t shot a roll of film with the lens so I won’t know if I have brought a lemon.
10 April 2021 The film has come back from the lab and here is one of those frames.
There is some slight movement in the aperture blades from f2 to f2.8 but from the testing I did it makes very little difference to the exposure. So we are all good.
However, there is some light leak on the film. I don’t know if it is a bad roll of film or if it is the film back that has a broken seal. I know it is not the camera body as the light leak is in between the frames on the film.
What I will do now is to try out a different roll of film to eliminate that as a factor. But if it is the film back that is leaking it is supposed to be relatively easy fix. Something I may give a go at.
19 April 2021 Using a new roll of film has given me some light spots after development. They are in the exact same positions as before, so it is pointing more to a broken seal in the film back. So going to try the other back I have just to be certain there isn’t an issue with the camera.
19 November 2023 I was thinking that I didn’t have any images which showed what the bokeh was like with this lens. So I thought I might as well take some test shots with it adapted to the Nikon Z8.
Using the Rotolight Neo 3 so that each emitter could be seen and with the camera far enough that the frame was filled these are the pictures.
The lens was focused to infinity for this one.
And minimum focusing distance for this one.
For me it really isn’t the shape or look of the out of focus area but the fact that you can isolate a subject with a wide open lens is what I like about bokeh. It is a tool to make a messy background not the centre of attention in a picture.
patrickphotos.blog 