by lenstechdom » Sun Aug 13, 2017 3:31 am
I'd be happy to share any knowledge I have, although I don't own any Mitchell or 35mm lenses myself. The rental house I worked for previously had a wonderful collection of vintage cameras and lenses, including a blimped Mitchell on a geared head, which I spent a lot of time exploring. There was a complete set of Super Baltars in BNCR mount with that Mitchell which I converted to PL mount when I discovered them, which subsequently got rented out virtually non-stop and earned more than when they were last used on the Mitchell 40 or 50 years previously.
We also had sets of re-housed Cooke Speed Panchros, as well as quite a few originals (usually in Arri Standard mount). The re-housed Speed Panchros were also extremely popular. With the advent of digital cinema cameras that could finally rival film from around 2010 many Directors of Photography found that vintage lenses added an organic quality that humanised the potentially sterile, overly clean digital image. The value of Super Baltars, Speed Panchros, Zeiss Super Speeds, Canon K35s and many other older lenses designed for the cinema has exploded since then.
The difference between series I and II Speed Panchros is a slightly larger image circle and some additional aberration correction, but hard to tell from the outside. Series II are mostly marked as such on the front ring, alhough I have been confused by some marked with just a red "II" while later serial numbers were not. They came in all sorts of mounts including NC, BNC, Arri S and Cameflex (Eclair).
I'd be happy to share any knowledge I have, although I don't own any Mitchell or 35mm lenses myself. The rental house I worked for previously had a wonderful collection of vintage cameras and lenses, including a blimped Mitchell on a geared head, which I spent a lot of time exploring. There was a complete set of Super Baltars in BNCR mount with that Mitchell which I converted to PL mount when I discovered them, which subsequently got rented out virtually non-stop and earned more than when they were last used on the Mitchell 40 or 50 years previously.
We also had sets of re-housed Cooke Speed Panchros, as well as quite a few originals (usually in Arri Standard mount). The re-housed Speed Panchros were also extremely popular. With the advent of digital cinema cameras that could finally rival film from around 2010 many Directors of Photography found that vintage lenses added an organic quality that humanised the potentially sterile, overly clean digital image. The value of Super Baltars, Speed Panchros, Zeiss Super Speeds, Canon K35s and many other older lenses designed for the cinema has exploded since then.
The difference between series I and II Speed Panchros is a slightly larger image circle and some additional aberration correction, but hard to tell from the outside. Series II are mostly marked as such on the front ring, alhough I have been confused by some marked with just a red "II" while later serial numbers were not. They came in all sorts of mounts including NC, BNC, Arri S and Cameflex (Eclair).