Fujinon Fujinon-W 180mm f/5.6

Stop this lens down to f/22 and the corners snap into the same plane as the center, no fall-off you can see on a sheet of 4x5. The Fujinon-W is a plasmat, the symmetrical anastigmat Paul Rudolph worked up around 1918 by uncementing the rear group of his Dagor double-meniscus design. It is not a double-Gauss. Six elements, two cemented triplet groups in the classic form, and that symmetry is exactly what holds the field flat and keeps distortion negligible where a Tessar would start to bow. On 4x5 a 180mm reads as a short portrait length, a touch longer than the textbook normal, and Fuji's published image circle of roughly 305mm at f/22 (about 80 degrees, enough to just cover 8x10) gives you real room to swing, tilt, and rise before the corners go dark. The later EBC version is rated a bit tighter, down around 280mm.

Fuji built these from the mid-1970s into the early 2000s, and they sat directly across from the Schneider Symmar-S and the Rodenstock Sironar-N at the camera store counter. Same focal options, same Copal shutters, comparable performance, and for years the Fujinon was the one you bought because it cost less. The Copal No. 1 sample with the 58mm thread and the lettering on the front barrel is the single-coated W, a common one to find secondhand. The earliest Ws came in a Seiko shutter and are likewise single-coated, with markedly less flare resistance than the later EBC multicoated bodies. Color out of either is neutral and runs slightly cool, on the clean side rather than the warm side, which matters if you shoot chromes and care about skin.

Where it gives ground is flare and veiling when a bright source sits just outside the frame. A plasmat carries a lot of air-to-glass surfaces, and the single-coated samples especially will wash out under a low sun or a window in the corner. Run the lens shade and flag the light. The barrel is also physically large for a 180, so a folding field camera can feel front-heavy with this hung off the front standard. Annoying to pack, irrelevant to the negative once it is set up.

It is a leaf shutter in a Copal 1, so flash syncs at every marked speed up to 1/400 with no focal-plane limit to fight, and that is why studio and product shooters leaned on the W series for strobe. The slow end is the one to respect in the field. Down at half a second and one full second the ground glass goes dim and reciprocity starts to bite on long exposures. Meter the actual scene luminance with Zone Light Meter and let it apply the film's reciprocity curve, so a metered eight seconds does not come back thin and muddy.

People still buy these used precisely because they go for short money against the German rivals. A clean multicoated 180 W in a working Copal is one of the cheaper ways onto a 4x5 with glass that resolves well past what most film stocks record. The honest caveat is condition. Check the shutter speeds on a tester, look for separation in the cemented groups, and budget for a CLA. Do that and you have a lens that earns its keep for the price of a couple boxes of film.