Schneider Xenar Lenses

[Joe Walker]

Can anybody give me the skinny on these new lenses? I've been told and read that the barrels extend when you focus them, and I know Chrosziel offers a special focus gear to accomodate this but I was curious if any of you have any real experience with them. Like how far do the barrels extend? Farther (i.e. worse) than Zeiss superspeeds? I like the T-stops on them but the thought of all that barrel movement has me somewhat hesitant.

 

[tom.wong]

they barrel pretty far, so far you need to even get an extra fat arri gear for your follow focus so it doesn't slip off the teeth. if you don't have the chrosziel with the proper bellows, it's going to hit into your mattebox/nd filter if you're doing very long pulls. not to mention it retracts away from the mattebox too if u don't have it going the other way.


that ended up being a deal breaker for a lot of people. but if you have all the right set up, the optics are quite good. bokeh is unbelievable. but the mechanics are where it falls a little short, hence the price point. out of the sub 20k lens sets, i think the schneiders personally had some of the better optics, but the big sacrifice is the mechanics. Best thing is to always just find a local dealer and test for yourself. If you plan to just owner/operate, they can be really great for your own kit. I just don't expect to see much out of rentals from them because of those issue I mentioned.

Hope that helps.