Komura Telemore 95 2x teleconverter ~ a quick look

Living where I do, I absolutely know much how fortunate I am to live in peace.  There is mental space and physical safety to do the things I want, like write these little amount to nothing important blog entries.  

Not everyone has this option these days.  We receive daily reminders of this fact and it's downright heartbreaking.  People are being killed for a man's out-sized sense of power, control, and entitlement.  I wish peace for everyone.

Here is what Peter Turnley has been doing in the Ukraine.  And here are some of his photos.

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From time to time a person can find cheap, old, third party teleconverters that date from the age of manual focus lenses.  Vivitar, Soligor, Komura and many brands were sold as a way to double the focal length of a lens.

While in concept this might seem interesting and useful under the right circumstances, the old 3rd party converters had a bad reputation, even back in the day.

When I recently received a lens there was a Komura 2x Telemore 95 converter in the box, too.

I can't find anything about the first version of this converter.  Version II is reputed to be a 7 element device of fairly decent quality.  But since I know nothing about version I, I thought I'd try it out with a Nikon Nikkor-P f/2.5 105mm pre-Ai Xenotar-type lens.

 Setup - 

• Sony A7 - ISO100, 2 second timer, in-camera levels used to square the whole plot up
• Manfrotto tripod - it's capable of securing an 8x10inch view camera, so it's sturdy enough for this
  
• Lenses -
• Nikon Nikkor-P 105mm f/2.5 pre-Ai Xenotar-type
  
• Komura Telemore 95 2x teleconverter
  
• Rawtherapee "Auto Match"
  

Comparison - 

Here is the scene setup.  It's just a pair of closed gaze scrims in our apartment.  The details are interestingly small, so therefore useful for this kind of "wee look-see." 

 

 

[As always, click on the image and look at it to 100percent file size to see whatever there is to be seen.]

 

 

Comments -

The Nikon Nikkor-P 105mm f/2.5 pre-Ai Xenotar-type lens is beautiful from wide open.  It shows a slight softness at f/2.5 and becomes very sharp at f/4.

From years of looking at Nikon lenses by the hundreds, I swear they designed their lenses this way.  Just a touch of softness wide open and very sharp one click down all the way through to the smallest aperture.  

If I were a betting man, I'd wager dollars to doughnuts that Nikon understands the Japanese market better than anyone.  Wide open with under-corrected spherical aberration behind the point of focus gives a gloriously subtle, smooth effect that, apparently, Japanese photographers love.  With a few exceptions, the Nikon lenses I've looked at exhibit this kind of performance.

Adding the Komura Telemore 95 to the mix and we see that the corners suffer terribly until f/8.  The center looks somewhat acceptable from wide open, but those edges are horrible.  

 No wonder these have a bad reputation.