Turner Reich lenses were made by Gundlach Camera Corporation from I believe the late 1890's through the late 1940's. They are not rare. And they are at the bottom of the performance pile of so called convertible lenses.
Gundlach, a true american co. didn't like to pay the license fees to Zeiss or Goerz for the best designs so they would take a design like the Zeiss Convertible Protar and add an element, re-inventing it. Voila, no fees. So the Turner Reich was a Protar copy that had 5 glasses, 1 group, all cemented with Canada balsam instead of 4 like the Bausch & Lomb Protar VII which did pay the license fees.
As found now 100 years hence plus or minus they almost always have crazing from the cement going bad between cell 3 and 4. A while ago I bought a full plate Seneca and it had a TR 10 1/2" lens that was just phenomenally bad. You couldn't make it sharp if you stopped down to f90. I considered tossing it in the trash. Then I noticed.....sometime in it's rediculously long life the cement had gone so bad that element 4 and 5 had departed the lens completely. So front group had all 5, and rear group had 3 elements.
Being naturally curious I took it in the house and made some photographs. Although not particularly sharp it had a quality of roundness that would be superb for portraits. Rather like a Heliar shot wide open. Well this story is getting long but in the intervening couple of years I have modified 3 other TR's with 3 elements in both groups on purpose to get the look you see here.
bamboo #1
bamboo #2
bamboo #1 was 7 seconds f6.8 and bamboo #2 was 14 minutes f45 1/2
Hard to show in a .jpg the subtle quality of roundness these lenses bring to the images.
Gundlach, a true american co. didn't like to pay the license fees to Zeiss or Goerz for the best designs so they would take a design like the Zeiss Convertible Protar and add an element, re-inventing it. Voila, no fees. So the Turner Reich was a Protar copy that had 5 glasses, 1 group, all cemented with Canada balsam instead of 4 like the Bausch & Lomb Protar VII which did pay the license fees.
As found now 100 years hence plus or minus they almost always have crazing from the cement going bad between cell 3 and 4. A while ago I bought a full plate Seneca and it had a TR 10 1/2" lens that was just phenomenally bad. You couldn't make it sharp if you stopped down to f90. I considered tossing it in the trash. Then I noticed.....sometime in it's rediculously long life the cement had gone so bad that element 4 and 5 had departed the lens completely. So front group had all 5, and rear group had 3 elements.
Being naturally curious I took it in the house and made some photographs. Although not particularly sharp it had a quality of roundness that would be superb for portraits. Rather like a Heliar shot wide open. Well this story is getting long but in the intervening couple of years I have modified 3 other TR's with 3 elements in both groups on purpose to get the look you see here.
bamboo #1
bamboo #2
bamboo #1 was 7 seconds f6.8 and bamboo #2 was 14 minutes f45 1/2
Hard to show in a .jpg the subtle quality of roundness these lenses bring to the images.
