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  1. #2
    Senior Member
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    Dec 2008
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    I've had a fair bit, and I could give you a really detailed rundown of the entire Ukrainian lens-making industry if you want (and if i had time).

    In short, they're not bad, but they're not great. The Arsenal factory in the Ukraine, along with a few others (like kmz, gomz etc), produced Medium format cameras (kiev 60 is a ripoff of the east-german Pentacon six, kiev88 is a ripoff of the Hasselblad 1000), and lenses (mostly designs stolen from the Zeiss Jena factory after WW2). Generally the lenses were very good optically (being zeiss designs), but coatings not the best and QC was worse than SigRon on a very bad day. Companies like Hartblei took all of those shoddy-quality lenses and bodies, re-worked them, QCed them, put their own badges on them, and sold them for higher prices (but at least you knew you were getting something decent). Hartblei also came up with the superrotator, taking MF lenses with MF flange-distances and image circles, putting 35mm lens-mounts on them, decent T/S mechanics with independent tilt/shift rotations (years before the 24L II), and selling them for under $1000. A guy called Stefan split Hartblei up, took the good half to Germany, went into partnership with Zeiss, and now still makes superrotators for $5000 each.
    This Arax t/s is unfortunately not a superrotator. Araxfoto does pretty much the same thing though, takes the MF lens designs and turns them into t/s lenses. The 35mm is a bit different, there was never a 35mm MF lens (except for 30mm fisheye), so it's not a zeiss ripoff design, they designed it themselves (for whatever that's worth. I'm not sure if it has fully independent rotations for everything though. There's a review here if you haven't already read it. Centres look sharp from f/5.6, corners at f/8. So in comparison to the TS-E 24 L II, it's a fraction of the price but it's nowhere near the quality either.
    One word about the price, the araxfoto website has them for $700. If you're patient you can find someone selling one second-hand on ebay and it might go for closer to $2-300. You can also get second-hand superrotators for about the same price (if you wait long enough), that's where I'd be putting my money.

    Given that Samyang are also know to do really good optics, and they're about to release a TS 24mm, I'd be waiting on reviews of them as well before dropping more than a few hundred (The samyang will probably be about $1-1200, but should be worth the upgrade from the arax)
    Last edited by Dr Croubie; 11-09-2012 at 08:53 PM.
    An awful lot of electrons were terribly inconvenienced in the making of this post.
    Gear Photos

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