Heinz Kilfitt

The most prolific of the other manufacturers to have produced lenses in the Praktisix/Pentacon Six mount was probably the Heinz Kilfitt Optical Works of Munich in former West Germany.  Here are details of their lenses available in the USA in 1963, as reported in Al Gillespie’s Pentacon Six Newsletter No 2 of April 1975.
 

All of these lenses have a pre-set aperture.  I have not found a way to mount the 150mm and 300mm Kilars/Tele-Kilars directly onto a Pentacon Six.

Zoomar

Al Gillespie reports that the Kilfitt firm was acquired by US-based Zoomar Inc.  In 1975 they were still selling the 90mm Macro-Kilar, the two 300mm lenses and the 600mm lens, now called “Tele-Kilar”.  They also manufactured the following lenses:  

The letters “SPI” in the mirror lens codes must stand for German “Spiegel”, which means “Mirror”, while the “F” no doubt comes from the German “fünfhundert”, which means “five hundred” and the “T” must stand for “Tausend”, German for “Thousand” – or of course these letters could be derived from the English!

The full name of the zoom lens is “Rapid-Focus-Tele-Zoomar”.  Its code “RAFTE” must be derived from “RApid-Focus-TEle-Zoomar”.  It was the first Medium Format zoom lens and is very highly spoken of.  Like the other lenses, it was available in mounts for a range of cameras, and a Norita mount version is known to exist.  A review of it in Pentacon Six mount can be seen on this website – see here.

There was also another Kilfitt Medium Format zoom lens:

World-wide, this was the second Medium Format zoom lens  to be produced.  f/2.8 is a very fast aperture for a zoom lens, any zoom lens, and even more so for Medium Format.  This lens has a full 2× zoom range.  It would appear to be quite rare and I do not currently have any further information on it. It is not mentioned in Pont’s book (see below).  The code must be derived from “RApid Focus MAcro”.

Lens mounts

As an independent manufacturer of photographic lenses that were designed for use on cameras from a wide range of different manufacturers, Kilfitt offered interchangeable mounts for its lenses and in theory, any lens could be mounted onto any camera of that format or smaller.  For instance, via a suitable adapter, lenses designed to cover the 6×6 medium format could also be mounted on 35mm (24×36mm format) cameras.  Obviously, lenses could (or should) not be mounted on cameras of a larger format than the one for which they were designed, since the image that they project onto the film will not cover the larger format (and almost certainly will not focus to infinity).

Kilfitt’s mounting system normally consisted of two components:

• a base that was either part of the lens or had been attached to it by various small screws (four is the number of screws on the mounts that I have seen)
• a camera mount that could be attached to the base.

Over the years, Kilfitt developed its interchangeable mount system, and I am aware of three different systems that he/the company used.

Base Codes

The base for each system had a different code:

• KI  This seems to have been a system used with the earlier lenses, principally for 35mm cameras (but also for the front end of the Multi-Kilar converter, which can be used on Medium Format cameras).  Patrice-Hervé Pont (see below) implies that this designation may be derived from the word Kilar.
• AN This was used subsequently for lenses for 35mm cameras and for some of the first Kilfitt lenses for Medium Format.  Patrice-Hervé Pont says that this code is derived from the German word Anschluss (connection).
• WE This system seems to be the most common on later lenses for Medium Format cameras, but also for some lenses (all later lenses??) designed for other formats.  Patrice-Hervé Pont says that this code is derived from the German word Wechsel (change)

Camera Mount Codes

The camera mount would be attached to the base, which was permanently or semi-permanently attached to the lens.  “Semi-permanently” means that a user or a technician with a small screwdriver and a steady hand could remove the base and replace it with something different.  However, this is not a job to be done “in the field”, nor normally to be done by the user.
Like the different base systems, each camera mount had a code.  For visitors to this website, the main camera mount that is relevant has the code SI (for “Praktisix” or “Pentaconsix”).

Thus, the full name of the Praktisix/Pentaconsix camera mount for the WE base is WESI.
It would appear that the name of the Praktisix/Pentaconsix camera mount for the AN base is ANSI or ANSIX.

With three base systems, dozens of camera manufacturers and dozens of Kilfitt lenses (each of which had its own unique code), the number of Kilfitt codes ran into the hundreds.  Most of them (over 350 codes!) are listed in the book by Patrice-Hervé Pont, although he states (p. 98) that his list is certainly not complete.

Serial numbers

Kilfitt/Zoomar lenses have serial numbers in two parts:

• a 3-digit prefix
• a serial production number usually consisting of four digits, and rarely of five.

The two parts of the serial number are separated by a hyphen: –

When different versions of a lens were produced over time, the prefix number usually changed between each version.