Schneider Super-Symmar XL 150mm f/5.6

Roughly 386mm of usable coverage out of a 150mm lens is the kind of number that breaks your sense of scale. On 4x5 it means you can rise, shift, and tilt until the bellows physically bind and the corners are still clean. The bigger point is what that circle does on 8x10: it covers the full frame with about 44mm of movement to spare, which makes this a true 8x10 super-wide, somewhere around what a 20mm gives you on 35mm. Schneider rated it for 105 degrees. So the lens you bolt onto a 4x5 monorail as a normal with absurd headroom is the same lens that works as a wide on the format two sizes up.

Schneider didn't get there by stretching a plasmat. A plasmat (the Symmar-S, the APO-Symmar, the Rodenstock Apo-Sironar-S) is a near-symmetric six-element type that runs out of road around 70 to 75 degrees, and you cannot push one to 105 degrees and 386mm of circle no matter how you grind it. The Super-Symmar XL is a separate wide-angle design, six elements in four groups, one of them aspherically ground, and that aspheric surface is how it holds correction across a field a plasmat can't reach. The behavior follows from the design. Stop down to f/16 or f/22 and it is crisp from the axis out to the far edge of the circle, with the cool, neutral Schneider color that reads stone and concrete without a warm cast. Contrast is high, the multicoating keeps flare in check, and wide open at f/5.6 it is fine for focusing under the cloth, which is all anyone asks of it there.

About falloff, be honest with yourself about your format. This is a 105-degree wide-angle, and a 105-degree field obeys cos to the fourth like everything else. On 4x5 the illumination drop is mild and plenty of people never bother with a center filter. On 5x7 and 8x10 it's roughly a stop into the corners, and Schneider sold a dedicated center filter (the IVa) for exactly this lens to even it out, recommended specifically when you're shooting transparency film and can't fix it later. Don't expect this lens to escape the center-filter math that comes with its coverage class. It doesn't.

Architecture and large-format landscape shooters are who reach for it. If you photograph tall buildings on 4x5 and keep running a standard plasmat out of coverage, watching the corners go dark on a big rise, the extra circle here is the reason to spend the money. The comparison people raise is the Rodenstock Apo-Sironar-S 150mm, and it's a real lens, sharp and a bit cheaper, but it's a standard-coverage plasmat at around 231mm of circle. It isn't a coverage rival to this. So the actual decision isn't Schneider versus Rodenstock, it's whether you need the movements and the bigger formats at all. If you never tilt past a few degrees or rise more than an inch, you're paying XL money for coverage you'll never touch, and a plain plasmat will do.

The catch beyond price is the front: 77mm. That's large for a 150, and it pushes you into oversized grads and ND that cost more and aren't always stocked. One metering note. Close focus on large format eats light fast, and at still-life distances the bellows extension can cost a stop or more that a handheld reading never sees. Let Zone Light Meter compute the bellows factor from your extension before you set the leaf shutter. The meter reads the scene; it can't read how far you've racked the standard out.