Kodak Ektar 80mm f/2.8

When Victor Hasselblad showed his first civilian camera in New York in October 1948, the lens on the front of it was American. Göteborg had no optical works, and the German industry was still in pieces, so the standard lens of the 1600F was Kodak’s: an Ektar 80mm f/2.8, Lumenized, focusing from half a metre to infinity, and made in Rochester. The 1949 Swedish factory brochure prices the whole outfit — camera, this lens, a roll-film magazine and a strap — at kr 1,850, and the 1951 English brochure calls it a critical-definition lens of the highest quality, which is sales copy but also the only technical description the factory published.

The design is Fred E. Altman’s. The corresponding Eastman Kodak patent, no. 2,279,384, was filed in January 1941, and Marco Cavina reads the result as a five-element arrangement in three groups with a cemented doublet at either end — the architecture of the Voigtländer Apo-Lanthar, itself a Heliar derivative. That count is not universally agreed. English Wikipedia’s Hasselblad lens list gives four elements in three groups; lens-db.com goes further and reports both a 4/3 and a 5/3 version in circulation. No source consulted here shows two distinct computations, and the likeliest explanation is a count copied wrong and then repeated, but the disagreement is real and worth stating.

What is not in doubt is the glass. Cavina identifies the rear element as a thorium-oxide crown of roughly nD 1.744 and vD 45.7 — the same family of radioactive glasses Kodak used across the postwar Ektar line — which is why aged examples read faintly hot on a counter and are often visibly yellow. The tint is a colour centre, not a coating fault, and clears under sustained ultraviolet light. The rest of the barrel is plain: a pre-set aperture with a setting knob and a stopping-down knob rather than an automatic diaphragm, since the 1600F offers no coupling to drive one; Kodak Series VII drop-in filters; and no shutter at all, because exposure is the body’s stainless-steel focal-plane curtain.

Dating one is easy. Kodak stamped a two-letter year code read through CAMEROSITY — C=1, A=2, M=3, E=4, R=5, O=6, S=7, I=8, T=9, Y=0 — so ET is 1949, EY 1950, EC 1951. Q.G. de Bakker’s dating page on Hasselblad Historical points out that Victor Hasselblad liked the trick enough to build his own version of it, VHPICTURES, for the camera bodies. Quantities are softer: Cavina puts roughly 3,000 Kodak lenses of all types into Hasselblad’s hands, most of them 80mm, and a figure of 3,641 for the 80mm alone circulates from the same article. Neither number comes from a surviving factory ledger.

The end came from accountancy. Cavina’s explanation, and the one that fits the dates, is that postwar exchange rates made Kodak optics prohibitively expensive to sell in Europe despite their quality; from about 1952 the Zeiss-Opton Tessar 80mm f/2.8 took the standard-lens slot, and by the 1000F of 1953 the Kodak line was gone. What survives is a short, well-made lens that only fits an orphan mount: the 1600F bayonet sits 82.1mm from the film against the V system’s 74.9mm, so nothing later will take it.

Open questions. The element count remains genuinely unsettled, and it would take a disassembly or a period Kodak data sheet to close it. Neither weight nor barrel dimensions appear in any source consulted. No separate American list price for the lens alone has been found, only the Swedish outfit price. And the serial range is known only by its year letters — no start and end numbers have been published.