Fujinon Fujinon-W 150mm f/5.6

If you shoot 4x5 and own exactly one lens, odds are good it is this one or its Schneider and Rodenstock cousins. A 150mm is the normal focal length for the format, the lens that covers a sheet with room to move, and for years the Fujinon-W was the budget way in. Fuji glass moved cheap on the used market while the Symmar-S and Sironar-N held their value, so a lot of people landed here to save the difference. Same job for less money, and on the negative you would struggle to pick which one shot what.

The W is a plasmat, six elements in four groups, single-coated. (The later NW series is the air-spaced EBC version, and the practical image difference between them is close to nothing.) The image circle runs about 245mm at f/22, which is genuinely roomy for a 150. That is enough to cover 5x7, not just 4x5, with real movement left over on the smaller format. Stopped down to f/22 or f/32, where you actually work landscape, it resolves cleanly to the corners with high, even contrast. Flare control holds up better than you would expect for a single-coated lens of this age, which earns its keep when you are shooting into the light on a view camera and have nowhere to hide a hood.

Wide open at f/5.6 it goes soft and flat, and that is fine. Nobody buys a 150mm view lens to shoot it wide open. The f/5.6 aperture exists so there is enough light on the ground glass to focus under the cloth. By the time you have stopped down to a working aperture the optics have caught up, and a plasmat at normal subject distances lays a flat scene down evenly across the frame.

The honest limit is what even 245mm cannot do, which is survive very aggressive front rise for architecture. Crank the standard up hard on 4x5 and you eventually walk off the edge of the circle, the corners darken and smear, and you are out of coverage. People shooting buildings reach for a Super-Symmar XL or a dedicated wide for exactly that reason. For landscape, portraiture, and product work, the W gives you all the movement you need and then some.

It sits in a Copal 0 leaf shutter, so flash syncs at every speed, which helps if you are mixing strobe into tungsten-balanced product work. Speeds top out around 1/400 or 1/500 and run down through one second plus bulb. The 52mm front thread takes standard filters, so a grad for the sky screws right on. The one habit this lens demands is bellows compensation. At normal distances you can ignore it, but rack the bellows out for a tight still life or a head-and-shoulders portrait and your effective aperture drops, so you need to add exposure. Zone Light Meter computes the bellows factor from your extension, so the math is handled before you stop down.

These turn up cheap now, and they make a fine first lens for anyone crossing over from medium format into sheet film. The Schneider and Rodenstock partisans will tell you their glass is better corrected at the edges, and under a loupe they are probably right. Printed at f/32, the difference does not survive the trip to the paper. Find a clean copy at a fair price and shoot it.