Copal 1 lenses - which of these are good for digital & movements

[TimoK]

The Rodenstock Apo-Sironar N (Sinaron-S) lenses are quite good and better than the Schneider Apo-Symmar S for resolution.

The best of the film lenses from about 100mm and longer in terms of Digital use, are the Apo-Sironar-S from Rodenstock, and the close design, late copy, from

Schneider, the Apo-Symmar-L. I have used them with even High MP backs up to 210mm focal length. Above that a mechanical #3 shutter has too much vibration.

The color correction in those 2 series and a new glass formula makes a big difference. But the late Apo-Sironar N, are also good with backs up to perhaps 60-80mp.

With longer focal lengths you also usually gain a stop in depth of field when shooting digitally, as the light rays are more perpendicular to the film or sensor, and so diffraction is mitigated to some extent.

If you shoot a Rodenstock Apo-Sironar N or Schneider Apo-Symmar S against either the Rodenstock Apo-Sironar S, or the Schneider Apo-Symmar L, you should see the difference.

The color contrast is way better while retain great sharpness, and the image circles of both the Rodenstock S and the Schneider L are also larger.

Remember, when you design a lens with contrast in mind, sharpness goes down, but when you design with sharpness as the most important goal, the contrast is usual lower, and

image appears somewhat flat by comparison some other lenses designed for contrast and color contrast, as the top goal.

Rod

If I know there never was a lens named Apo-Symmar-S. I guess you combine Apo-Symmar and Symmar-S to make a new name.

The last generations of that large format workhorse were Symmar-S -> Apo-Symmar -> Apo-Symmar-L.
At the approx. same eras Rodenstock made lenses called Sironar-N -> Apo-Sironar-N -> Apo-Sironar-S.

So the competiting pairs were Sironar-N against Symmar-S, Apo-Sironar-N against Apo-Symmar and Apo-Sironar-S against Apo-Symmar-L. There were also older generations of Sironars and Symmars w/o letters.

Sinar rebranded Rodenstock lenses to Sinarons. Apo-Sironar-N became Sinaron-S and Apo-Sironar-S became Sinaron-SE. I'm not sure what happened to Sironar-N. Also other camera manufacturers e.g. Alpa did that kind of renaming.

All these were 70° to 75° Double Gauss 6/4 type lenses for general use.

Rodenstock also made 80° seven element Apo-Sironar (without letter), later named to Apo-Sironar-W, to compete with Schneider's 80° eight-element Super-Symmar HM.

Later, when the digital era started the lens names became more confusing.

Some informative brochures:

Schneider incl. Symmar-S 1986: https://www.cameraeccentric.com/static/img/pdfs/schneider_5.pdf
Schneider with no printing year ( show's Apo-Symmar, probably middle 1990s ?) https://www.cameraeccentric.com/static/img/pdfs/schneider_11.pdf

There's both Apo-Sironar-N and -S lenses in this Rodenstock 1995 brochure: https://www.cameraeccentric.com/static/img/pdfs/rodenstock_3.pdf