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Best Clasic C Mount Lenses from the 16mm era
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  • Made some test pictures with my own collection of c-mount lenses, cropping them to the sensor size of the BM Pocket Cinema camera. Observations: As a rule of thumb, avoid cctv lenses if you want to shoot high quality. They might work on a camera like the GH2 as lo-fi lenses, but if you shoot in photographic raw quality, they just look bad (unsharp, bad colors, distortions). That even includes the higher quality Fujinon cctv lenses.

    The following prime lenses that I tested are high quality and cover Super 16/BM Pocket Cinema Camera:

    • Schneider Xenon 16mm/2.0
    • Schneider Xenon 25mm/1.4
    • Kern Switar AR 25mm/1.4
    • Kern Switar AR 10mm/1.6: coverage, but with heavy distortion and unsharpness in the corners;
    • Schneider Xenon 10mm/1.8: clean image, but slight vignetting (black shadows in the corners)

    The following zoom lenses are affordable and cover the sensor size, and have decent image quality:

    • Schneider Variogon 18-90mm/2.0: full coverage & great image quality, and relatively compact size!
    • Cosmicar (=Pentax) 22.5-90/1.5: although this is a cctv zoom that can be cheaply bought 2nd hand under different brand names, quality and coverage is good. Only color reproduction is bad with a green tint. The Schneider is considerably better - great color fidelity, more sharpness, more contrast -, and much smaller.

    The hard part will be to find wide angle lenses (or zooms) that cover the sensor without spending the fortune that you normally need to spend for a professional Super 16 lens.