The Optical Story - article on the only lens maker ever from Spain

Here's another one of my articles dealing with the only lens maker (at least so far) from Spain. Unfortunately they decided to call that company "Optical"... you can imagine that it's a pain in the ... to research with that name.

I tried my best to find some information about the company and their products but unfortunately there still are lots of open questions. Believe it or not, I wasn't able to find even a single ad or mention in any book or catalog... Perhaps someone who knows where to find anything like that is going to stumble upon the article in the future and let me know. I'm still surprised how a company managed to sell their lenses without any kind of advertisement.

One of the reasons might be that they seem to have been a subsidiary of Benoist Berthiot a notable manufacturer of projection lenses from France... so they likely were able to use their channels (sales people etc.) and didn't have to rely on publicity beyond that. Another reason might be that it was just too small scale to leave a lot of traces. I don't have any concrete evidence of production numbers, but it's nowhere close to the big names among projection lens makers, like ISCO, Schneider, Zeiss, Bausch & Lomb etc.

However in my eyes that doesn't make their lenses any less interesting or capable. They made some uniquely interesting lenses and I had a lot of fun using them. Here's the link to the article:

deltalenses.com/the-optical-story/

Here are a couple of sample shots taken with Optical lenses:

It's impossible to get tired of the rendering of your photographs. 😉

Nice "swirl" on that one, brought out by the close focusing. Like my Helios 44-2 or the Zeiss upon which the 44-series was based.

All pictures are great, but I like this one in particular.

Thanks a lot! I like a couple of these lenses very much in terms of rendering. The 150-160 mm Projectar does produce images quite unlike anything I've ever seen before, perhaps in part due to the bad shape it's in, but also because of its specs (not too many 160 mm lenses with a speed of f/1.9 out there) and optical design (Petzval).

Thank you! It's interesting that so many people associate the swirl with the Helios, even though it's a property of so many old lenses (some many decades older). They're not as sharp and versatile, but the nice thing about projection lenses with a similar focal length to the Helios, is that they're usually faster.

Thanks a lot - I'm glad you like it!