tunalegs
Pretended Artist
Soligor 3.5/35 by Fujita by Berang Berang, on Flickr
I have some odd lenses in my Exakta collection, but by far the strangest is this Soligor 3.5/35mm lens. Just look at it. It's only a 35mm wide angle, of modest speed - but it's huge! The back-focus distance is also much larger than necessary, even for something like a Nikon F (a mount it was never offered in). Also, it's rather mysterious, as there's very little information about when these were made or by who.
The details of appearance and construction seem to point to Fujita, a company which produced what is claimed by some to be the first Japanese made retrofocus lens for 35mm cameras, the Fujita 2.5/35mm. But that's where things get strange, as this 3.5/35 has an older style of lens barrel than the 2.5/35 lens. As well the 3.5 performs so much more worse than the 2.5/35, it'd be crazy if the 2.5 version predates this abomination.
I first tried to use this lens on an Exa a few days ago, but found I couldn't tell what was in or out of focus, except very generally over a span of several feet. Swapping in a microprism screen proved to help not at all. Stopping down to f/5.6 did help a little... this is the only wide angle lens I've found that's easier to focus when stopped down.
I decided to put it on the DSLR, and put that on a tripod, and put it to a simple test. The results:
Soligor 3.5/35 results. by Berang Berang, on Flickr
There's no point posting the full sized image... the faults are apparent. Holy coma, batman! The glow wide open would embarrass even my novelty portragon soft-focus lens.
I've seen this thing in M42, Exakta, and Miranda mounts. It was offered by Soligor for a short period c. 1959. Interestingly, I don't think Soligor sold the faster/better 2.5 lens, although Peerless did under the Peerotar brand.
For fun, here are the test images, uncropped. Even at these tiny sizes and with lots of compression, it's apparent how awful this lens is wide open:
