Isco Iscaron 180/2.8

Are lenses of the past just a matter for some crazy collectors or do they worth some interest also for today photographers?


Today I'm talking about a lens made in West Germany probably in the late '60 or early '70. Isco was a subsidiary firm of the more famous Schneider lens manufacturer (actually it seems Isco meant "Ist Schneider's Company") and produced less expensive glasses than the Schneider ones.

Though some of its lens designs became pretty legendary in these days, the Iscaron 180/2.8 being one of them because of its wide aperture that was pretty uncommon for a 180mm tele lens and put it in direct confrontation with another legendary lens like the Zeiss "Olympia" Sonnar 180/2.8.

I got this lens in m42 mount which seems to be rarer to find, I met a lot more of this lenses in exakta mount (Exakta cameras were considered more professional than m42 ones like Praktica and similar).

So it was very easy for me to mount this lens on my Canon 5DmkII and get some test shots.

This lens is made of 5 elements in 3 groups, a preset diaphragm, manual focus of course with a shortest focus distance of 5.9 feet and a built in rotating tripod mounting collar.

But let's see how it behaves at full aperture with frontal lighting (not the best situation for a tele lens).




We can see that while sharpness isn't exceptional, chromatic aberrations are a lot less than many tele lenses I used, Sonnar 180 included, while the artifacts produced by the frontal lighting are kept pretty in line with just a bit of diffraction, which becomes nasty in the bokeh highlights in the out of focus area.

Having tested this lens in one of the worst situation where you can use it, I wanted to test it shooting some scenes that should be the ones it was designed for.





The results once the lens is stopped down are pretty impressive. Details and sharpness is on par with some of the best tele around while CA is kept to a minimum, in the first shot actually there's almost none. Even if I post processed my shots as usual, I can see that colors are well balanced even if the warmer ones tends to prevail. Its native contrast is also pretty good but not excessive, it's very hard to blown out highlights if you keep exposure under control.

This means that you should add a bit of contrast in post processing when you "develop" the RAW file while more modern lenses are more contrasty from start and you need to be very carefully when you expose not to burn out highlights. Sometimes this means that you then end up with too dark shadows and this is why I often prefer to use older lenses like this so I can have more details in the darker parts of the image.

To conclude this is a very good lens to shoot landscapes and nature but it could also be used for closer photography, like portraits, thanks to its luminosity and short focus distance, paying attention to lighting though as it is very prone to flare and other light produced artifacts.

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