Iskra with Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar

[Toni Nikkanen]

Hi! I've bought an apparently well-working Iskra 1 and it has a Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 75/3.5 lens. Everywhere on the net people write that this camera comes with an Industar lens that is an exact copy of the CZJ Tessar lens, I can't find anyone who says some were made with a lens that has CZJ Tessar written on it. Does anyone know if I possibly have a rarity camera that should be immediately sold to a collector - or is it actually common that these can have CZJ Tessar-labeled lenses? The third possibility is of course that someone has switched the lens sometime after manufacture; it certainly has been modified to disable the automatic film transport mechanism and added the window for frame number.

 

[Ernst Dinkla]

Hi! I've bought an apparently well-working Iskra 1 and it has a Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar 75/3.5 lens. Everywhere on the net people write that this camera comes with an Industar lens that is an exact copy of the CZJ Tessar lens, I can't find anyone who says some were made with a lens that has CZJ Tessar written on it. Does anyone know if I possibly have a rarity camera that should be immediately sold to a collector - or is it actually common that these can have CZJ Tessar-labeled lenses? The third possibility is of course that someone has switched the lens sometime after manufacture; it certainly has been modified to disable the automatic film transport mechanism and added the window for frame number.

Enough reports of Russian made Leica Thread Mount lenses with CZJ engravings so an occasional Iskra with a similar name plate should be possible. I doubt that the lens elements are different to the Industar labeled lens and a replacement of the total lens (helix and Moment shutter) with a Zeiss one must show in the shape of the lens and the tinkering done. The Industar's image quality is on par with the Zeiss Tessar's of that period, a perfect clone. It can carry both nameplates proudly.


met vriendelijke groeten, Ernst Dinkla

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[sevo]

Enough reports of Russian made Leica Thread Mount lenses with CZJ engravings so an occasional Iskra with a similar name plate should be possible.

There is no way a Iskra could have a legacy Zeiss lens from the war reparations. The Iskra was released when the Zeiss derived Moskva had become too outdated to appeal even to the Soviet market, and was loosely copied from the Agfa Super Isolette (itself a mid fifties development). Besides, there never had been a MF folder technology transfer beyond plans and patents (which were made available to all allies after WWII) - the Zeiss medium format folder production had been in Stuttgart, far beyond the reach of the Red Army, and not even the Moskva was built on original Ikonta machinery or with original parts.

There is a very slim chance that the Soviets ran out of lenses for a brief in-production period and had to fill a gap with some lenses ordered from GDR Zeiss, or that it is a Eastern Bloc repair job from a time when the Industar-58 was already out of production, where it would have been natural to fall back upon a Zeiss Jena Tessar, which remained in production up to 1989. In either case, we could spot that immediately if we knew the lens serial.

Much more likely is that it is a recent repair job using a lens taken from some entirely different camera - a so-called Frankencamera, worthless as a collectible, but ok as a user if the job was done right. Toni, did you buy it from Certo6?

Sevo

 

[wupdigoj]

Is the shutter original?. As far as I know, a Tessar will fit a compur shutter, but not the shutter of an Iskra.

Javier

 

[ZeissFan]

I would guess that someone has taken a shutter and Tessar lens from a different camera and put it onto this camera.

If the camera has been modified, then almost certainly it's an aftermarket job.

 

[Toni Nikkanen]

I showed the camera to an experienced camera repairman while picking up a stuck/paint falling apart Serenar 85/2 lens. He looked at it and was pretty sure the lens has been put on it afterwards for two reasons: it looked like it and it had a Compur shutter. Here's a bunch of pictures of it anyway but I'm pretty sure that's the case with this camera.

On an unrelated note I was thinking of covering that film window with something that is dark red.

Another is that it appears to be possible to cock the shutter in a almost-but-not-quite kind of way, so that the lever stays in the almost-cocked position and then you can think you're firing the camera with the shutter button when actually nothing really happens. So I'll just have to make sure I really cock the shutter and not just almost.

 

[Toni Nikkanen]

Oh and I bought it from a Finnish collector of Soviet optics (mikrof on huuto.net).

 

[sevo]

2328165 with a cm focal length makes that a 1938 lens. Positively a transplant, twenty years older than the camera, and in a shutter that does not seem to have originally belonged to the lens either (it looks suspiciously like grafted from the Super Isolette, and won't be pre-war in any case).

 

[Toni Nikkanen]

What do you think of the coating? I thought it could be multicoated from the simple assumption that since if reflects alternatively blue or purple depending on the angle, then it must be. But they didn't multicoat much in 1938, did they? Also appears the coating is pretty thoroughly scratched so it probably isn't the hardest coating in the world.

 

[sevo]

All coatings chance color when viewed from different angles - multicoatings are more transparent and tend to have non-blue reflections (and often a slight bicolor reflection) viewed from the front.

What you have there is a single coating - and probably a expensive extra in its time on a Tessar. Before the war, Zeiss had only started to coat Planars, Orthometars and other multi-surface designs by default.

Multicoating was not practicable at all before the fifties, and it took until the late sixties until true multicoatings had stabilized to the point where manufacturers dared to use it all across their product lines and advertise that fact.

 

[Toni Nikkanen]

Some quick notes before I have to leave for two days -
it's still shooting 6x6.
Pictures come up with low contrast probably due to all that scratching.
The back side of the lens has a serial number that partially matches the front side: 528165 on the back, 2328165 on the front, too close match to be a coincidence.

The back side of the lens (when opening the camera; i'm not going to dismantle it any) has some kind of screw-in threads on it, the existance of which doesn't make sense to me in this situation (out of words to describe it and too much in a hurry to take a pictuere of right now.)

 

[Toni Nikkanen]

example

example

Here's an example picture I took with the camera yesterday. Contrast has been enhanced in Photoshop, otherwise unaltered. The swirling background looks crazy; it swirls much more than my Meopta Flexaret VII with 80/3.5 Belar lens at full aperture and this one was at f5.6 I think.

 

[Ernst Dinkla]

Here's an example picture I took with the camera yesterday. Contrast has been enhanced in Photoshop, otherwise unaltered. The swirling background looks crazy; it swirls much more than my Meopta Flexaret VII with 80/3.5 Belar lens at full aperture and this one was at f5.6 I think.

Toni,

An amazing job in my opinion. Not optically it seems but for the rest. The serial number on the camera makes it younger than my Iskra. If it had an odd low number one could think of a prototype. The counter replacement by a red window doesn't have to be of the same period. The Iskra engineers must have had a look on the Compur shutter before building the Moment, flash connection fits the same milled indention. The man who did this job was lucky with that resemblance.
The Compur shutter may contain the Industar lens elements not placed correctly. Explains the swirl and the coating. The front ring seems to extend a bit more than normal, is that keeping the front lens element in place or is there another retainer ring behind it ?


Ernst Dinkla