Tele-Megor 40cm f/5.5 (SKa 4)

The longest lens of the SKa 4 system, and the third of the set the camera was designed around — 15cm folding inside the body, 25cm and 40cm through the bayonet.

Ross Aktiebolag of Göteborg was the company Victor Hasselblad ran through the war, building aerial cameras for the Swedish air force, and it is where the firm that later made the 1600F learned its trade. Ross built the bodies and, unusually, the shutters; it made no glass at all. The lenses came from Germany — Zeiss, Schneider and Hugo Meyer — and Hasselblad Historical notes that no documentation has been found describing how they were imported into a neutral country that badly needed optics and rather more badly needed to be left alone.

Nothing Ross fitted was anti-reflection coated; coating reached Swedish military optics after the war, and these lenses date from before it.

There is a discrepancy in the record worth flagging. Hasselblad Historical’s lens list for the SKa 4 names a 40cm Hugo Meyer Tele-Megor, while the same page’s weight table gives figures for a 250mm lens at 1.7kg and a 500mm lens at 2.4kg. Either the camera also took a 50cm lens that the list omits, or one of the two figures refers to this lens under a different designation. No other source settles it.

Hasselblad Historical’s account of the Ross cameras is the only substantial source on them, and its author marks several specifications as information requested — an open call to readers for detail he does not have. Maximum aperture, weight, element count and production quantities for this lens are among the figures that no published source gives, so what is recorded here is deliberately short.