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He sold it a few months ago.

I believe it's an ISCO projection lens. They usually don't have an aperture control so you're gonna have to shoot wide open. You can make a simply whole grab adapter to use it with a Chinese helicoid to focus.

Just flock your scope. There are a few YouTube videos on that.

Lovely videos! Good luck with your sale!

Same concept, you just need to align the front or rear glass to match the other.

Synchro focus has been utilized in both basic DIY, advanced DIY, and even at pro levels (Lomo Squarefront, Kowa Cine Prominar anamorphic, Nipponscope Series I, Dyaliscope, etc) for a long time. Here are a few DIYs

If it's fixed at something like 4m then you will be able to focus from 4m down to very very close, unless you have a special variable diopter that has both negative and positive power adjustment. I'd say the best way is to modify your scope to achieve inf and lock it there. Then you can use any focuser to focus it from inf down to about 1m.

There aren't "focus through" lenses. The lens you have without a focus ring is likely a fixed focus lens. That means they designed it to be focused at a specific distance eg. 4m or inf, depends on the manufacturer. You can, however, move the front or rear element back and forth to achieve different focus point. Check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmMiuMFQSuU for a similar lens.

Looking nice! What's the taking lens and camera?

Group no longer available?

There's a single focus version too, this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab7KFtUFv8s Basically it's the 1.33x-40 compact with SLR Magic Rangefinder builtin, non-removable. Also, there are two version of each, the one with near/normal focus distance and the other one with feet scale (they call it Cine, if I recall). Optically they're the same, with just different distance marking and the one with feet scale costs more.

Are you using the version without front vari-diopter? In that case, you need to double focus. Check this out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yneSk9wdJWw

Don't rely on the focus scale on the lens, they are usually off. For 16-D dissemble, check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYyK-HPo7_w

Just check both taking lens and anamorphic lens. If they can focus at infinity with good sharpness, then there's nothing wrong with your lenses, probably.

Try to verify the infinity focus first. Check this video https://www.cinesaga.com/courses/anamorphic-course/541614-chapter-7-putting-it-all-together/1605145-perfect-infinity-tuning If you can get sharp focus at infinity, then your scope is fine.

You got a special Isco then 🙂

The Isco Ultra Star should be a lot sharper. Maybe you got a bad copy that needed to be tuned up?

What I usually do is to open the image in PS and stretch it down to 50% horizontally and the crop 50% top and bottom. That's it. Beware that with most anamorphic lenses, when you focus at the closest possible distance (ie. 2m), the squeezing factor maybe reduced to lower than 2x, like 1.8x or so. So if you desqueeze your image by 2 times you might find that the people in the image look fatter than they should be.

Both Kowa 16-S and 16-D have 60mm OD. You can use any of these clamps from Raf https://rafcamera.com/adapter-60mm-to-m62x0-75f https://rafcamera.com/adapter-60mm-to-m67x0-75f https://rafcamera.com/adapter-60mm-to-m72x0-75f https://rafcamera.com/adapter-60mm-to-m77x0-75f

Nice idea, but the distance between your two lenses seem to be increased quite a lot though.

That looks good! I've seen a few coating polishing videos on YouTube but they're basically just making the scratches finer, not disappeared.

I think that's why you need a monitor with anamorphic support. On some cameras, like Panasonic S1H has built-in anamorphic mode for both recording and playback modes, so you'll get a proper view while recording and viewing the footage.

This is very interesting! Any before and after pics for the glass itself?

Somehow I don't get this. By reducing the length of the scope, I get that it would reduce some amount of the vignettes which means no sides cropping needed, thus more FOV? But then you lose 20% of 2x squeezing factor, that's from 2x to 1.6x. So how could you gain more FOV after losing 20% of the squeezing factor? Any explanation would be great, thank you!

Looking for one if anyone has it for sale 🙂