Swirl In Flare - Kowa 16-H - Misalignment?

[Jorge De La Colina]

Hello all, I hope you and your families are doing well during these difficult times.

New here and I had a question for you all. I've been wanting to experiment with anamorphic projection lenses on my spare time to get a feel for the format. After some time I found one that ticked off certain criteria I gravitated towards in terms of aesthetics and picked up what seemed to be a great condition Kowa 16-H from Japan on ebay last year.

I've done quite a few tests over the past year but there's a certain quality in the flare that suggests to me that the lens might have an alignment issue. It has a very slight swirl characteristic to the main blue flare. Also, I was very surprised that I had to work extra hard to get this lens to flare at all. It definitely needs to be a concentrated, bright light source over a dark background to see the flare characteristics. Rarely shows up in daytime exteriors. Not sure if this is the norm with Kowa 16-H's, but i've read it could be attributed to misalignment.

FYI - Sharpness seemed to be pretty good when I first got it, but a few months ago I went ahead and did the James Price sharpness tune up I came across on Tito's page to see if it would address the flare issue. Sharpness did improve.

Any ideas what it could be? Is it normal? Is it able to be fixed? I'm attaching a quick handheld example I did looped, as well as 2 still frames from the footage. Taking lens is a perfectly working Contax Zeiss, either fully open or 1 stop down.

Thanks for all your help, and stay safe!