Meyer's 300

I am not talking here about Spartans, Leonidas and the Battle of Thermopylae but about two old, long and heavy tele lenses produced in the communist side of Germany, the once DDR.

Meyer Optik was founded by Hugo Meyer in Görlitz, in Saxony and soon became famous for its large format lenses, especially the Plasmat series. Then production expanded to "consumer" lenses for the newly invented 35mm Exakta system and so we can meet the "ancestors" of one of the lenses I'm talking about today: the Telemegor series. In pre-war times the Telemegor series comprises of three lenses: 150/5.5, 180/5.5 and 250/5.5, all sharing the same construction with 4 elements in 2 groups.

During the war, because of military needs, longer focals were developed (actually it seems they were used as a pointing system for tanks), so just after the war the 300/4.5, 400/5.5 and 500/8 were produced for the exakta and praktica 35mm cameras in alu finish.

The sample I tested comes probably from the '70 with its complete black finish. The "boy" is pretty on the heavy side (1.8 kg.) and use of a tripod is pretty unavoidable. As for the rendering I sincerely expected something worse for a lens of so old design. Open is pretty soft but stopped down it's quite, even non exceptionally, sharp. One good things is that, contrary to the Sonnar 300/4 about whom I talked here it doesn't display any chromatic aberration, which is a real plus especially in landscape photography (yeah, I hate those purple outlines around the trees!).

The other Meyer lens is instead the new long tele series introduced in the '60: the Orestegors. The series consisted in 200/4, 300/4 an 500/5.6 lenses, with an optical scheme of 5 elements in 4 groups. In practical use this lens is a lot sharper full open (see the example below) while still having a good bokeh and again no evident chromatic aberration. The cons is that my 300mm is possibly even heavier than the Telemegor: about 2.2 kg!

These lensen were sold labelled Pentacon in the '70 and '80 when Meyer was integrated into the Pentacon VEB: their characteristics remained unchanged though till modern days, with simple single coatings and the many bladed apertures.

My conclusions are that these lenses, especially the more perfoming Orestegor, are very able performers, especially when you need great bokeh, limited chromatic aberration and good, warm colors. they lack the "character" of the Sonnars though, that I still prefer to use in portait work, reportage or street photography.

(Alessandro Guerani is a professional photographer specialized in food shooting. He lives in Bologna, Italy, and is available for assignments to create the images you always craved. Read the "About me" or contact him using the "Mail me" in the blog menu above.)

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