Vintage Rapid Rectilinear Bausch & Lomb 6.5-inch f/8 Camera Lens Test and Review
- Mohsen Jalali
- 17 hours ago
- 3 min read
This vintage Rapid Rectilinear Bausch & Lomb 6.5-inch f/8 lens we removed from a foldable Eastman Kodak is certainly the oldest of all the lenses we have tested and reviewed. These lenses were in production between 1910 and 1915, and considering the patent registration dates mentioned on the lens, which are Jan 18, 1910, and Jan 7, 1913, it seems that we have a later production of the series in hand. There are numerous interesting facts about this lens that I can write about. First of all, there is no focal length mentioned on it, and the 6.5-inch is what most online sources have mentioned as its focal length. Secondly, you may wonder why the f-stop is 4 on the lens, but what I've written is 8. The answer lies in the fact that back in the day, instead of the standardized f-stop system, there was another numbering system based on light transmission area, rather than the focal ratios that we use today, and it was called the Uniform System (no, the U.S. doesn't stand for the United States here!). In that system, 1 equaled an f-stop of 4 in the standard system, 2 equaled f/5.6, and 4 equaled f/8, and so on and so forth. The other interesting fact about this lens is that the camera it was mounted on is a 3-A film camera that used postcard-size negatives (3¼ × 5½ inches or 8.5 × 15 cm). So, the image that it creates is much larger than a full-frame 35mm sensor, and you won't see any trace of vignetting on account of the fact that this lens was mounted on a long bellows that naturally results in a smaller image. If you want to have an idea of what the mounting bellows looked like while testing this lens, take a look at this beast.
If you look at the top side of the lens, you will see a rounded, crown-like plate with numbers and the letters B and T. It's the shutter speed, and since this lens comes with the shutter mechanism, you can easily change it to what suits your needs by moving the arrow above it. As you can see in the photos, the shutter mechanism is a Kodak Ball Bearing Shutter. Here's what the camera and lens combination looked like.
Sources online say that this lens is designed with 4 elements in two groups. Also, this specimen that we have in hand has minor dust inside. As always, the camera used to take these shots was a Nikon Z7 set on vivid colors, the aperture was kept wide open, and the photos were mildly edited.
Color Shots
As you can see in the photos below, the shots can be sharp in the middle (such as the second photo from left), while the peripheries of the frame are visibly softer. Note that I needed to increase brightness slightly more than usual to make the shots brighter, but the details are not compromised. Shots are especially sharper when the camera is closer to the subject, which may be due to the long mount we had to use to connect it to our camera, making it macro-capable. This is most visible in the last shot of a fabric's texture. In the meantime, the bokeh that it gives you is soft and slightly bubbly, but not swirly.
Black-and-White Photography
As you can see in the shots below, the contrast is still low in most of the frames, although I increased it a little bit in post-production. The exception is the third photo below, where the subject was closer than other shots.
Flare
The last shot below makes the dust particles of the elements more visible than the other two. All things considered, the flare is nothing spectacular, but the bubbles in the bokeh show that, on account of the f/8, the bokeh is acceptable.
