Schneider Symmar-S 150mm f/5.6

Stop a Symmar-S down to f/22 and the negative goes flat across the whole frame, edge to edge, with that slightly cool Schneider rendering that makes gray rock and weathered wood look exactly like what your eye saw. For most people this is the first large-format lens they ever own, and it is the standard against which they later judge everything else they put on the front standard. On 4x5 the 150mm covers about the same diagonal as a 45mm on 35mm film. That is the framing nobody chooses on purpose and nobody ends up regretting. It sees the way you see.

The design is a plasmat, six elements in four groups, two near-symmetrical halves around the diaphragm. The "S" marks the point in the mid-1970s when Schneider moved the line to multicoating, which is why a clean Symmar-S flares far less into the light than the older single-coated Symmar convertibles it replaced. Sharpness wide open at f/5.6 is fine for focusing and composing on the ground glass, but nobody works there. You shoot this at f/16 to f/22, where it is bitingly sharp across an image circle of roughly 210mm. That circle just covers 4x5 with room for a reasonable rise or a bit of tilt, and that is the catch. It is a 4x5 lens with 4x5 movements, not a generous one. Run out of coverage on a tall building and you watch the corners go soft and dark before you expected to.

Landscape and architecture people lived on this lens through the 1980s, and a lot of them still do because the used market is full of them and they are cheap. The honest weakness, besides that modest image circle, is the bottom of the aperture range. Schneider marked it to f/64, but by f/45 diffraction is already eating into resolution, and f/64 exists for depth of field emergencies, not for sharpness. Use it when you must, not because the number is printed there.

What you cross-shop it against today is its own successor, the Apo-Symmar, plus the Rodenstock Apo-Sironar-S and the Nikkor-W and Fujinon-W in the same 150mm f/5.6 Copal 0 class. The newer apochromats hold color fringing tighter and the Sironar-S throws a bigger circle. But the Symmar-S costs a third of an Apo-Sironar-S and gives up very little a contact print or a 16x20 will ever show. For black and white sheet film it is hard to spend more money sensibly.

One metering habit matters here. The moment you rack the bellows out past infinity for anything close, a portrait head, a tabletop, a flower, you lose real light, and at 1:1 that is a full two stops. Zone Light Meter computes the bellows factor for you from the focal length and your measured extension, so meter the scene, dial in the extension, and let the app fold the compensation into the exposure. The Copal 0 leaf shutter syncs flash at every speed up to 1/500, which is the other reason studio shooters reach for a lens like this.