Pentacon Six Mount teleconverters

Medium Format Lenses with the Pentacon Six Mount
A comparative test
by TRA

The teleconverters

There are at least three 2× teleconverters in the Pentacon Six mount:

A converter manufactured by Panagor in Japan in the 1970s
A converter manufactured by Arsenal in Kiev, Ukraine
A converter manufactured by Joseph Schneider of Bad Kreuznach, Germany

Other 2× converters

There are some other teleconverters with the Pentacon Six mount, but these appear to be variants of the top two converters listed above.

“Tiger” appears to be a name under which the Panagor was marketed in some countries, including the USA.
a 2× converter labelled “WEP AUTO KINOTELEX 2×” is sometimes seen on eBay. This looks identical to my Panagor Auto Tele Converter. This name appears to have been used principally by a distributor in Germany.
a 2× converter labelled “Hartblei” is occasionally seen. There is conficting information on who or what “Hartblei” is or was, but all their lenses, including the 2× converter, use exactly the same optical components as the corresponding Arsenal products. They include two improvements:

For this website I have compared the three 2× teleconverters with each other and with the Vivitar 2× teleconverter manufactured in the Hasselblad mount. The 2× Kiev converter is much sharper than the Panagor. The Schneider 2× converter is better still, on a par with the Vivitar 2× converter in Hasselblad mount, or perhaps even better than it.

[C372-26A: three 2× converters with Pentacon Six / Exakta 66 / Kiev 60 mount, plus a Vivitar for the Hasselblad 500C
Front right is the Arsenal 1.4× converter]

The Vivitar 2× converter for the Hasselblad stands out immediately as being much bigger and heavier than the other converters.

Incompatibility limitations with the Joseph Schneider 2× converter

It is the shape of the Schneider 2× converter that is most different from all other converters with the Pentacon Six mount. As with the Carl Zeiss Oberkochen 2× converter for the Hasselblad, the front element of the Schneider converter is mounted at the end of a narrow tube a long way forward of the front mount of the converter. This means that it protrudes into the back of the lenses with which it is used, resulting in some compatibility problems. Although the Exakta 66 manual says that the 2× converter can be used with the 80mm lens, this is not the case (I am sure that the manual was written before the converter was manufactured). As later Exakta 66 literature states, the Schneider 2× converter can be used with (Schneider) lenses from 150mm on up. It can be used with very few Carl Zeiss Jena or Arsenal lenses, as they mostly have a rear element that is right at the back of the lens – although it works well with the Pentacon 500mm lens – see the section on 1000mm.

[C308-17: Close-up of the rear of the Carl Zeiss Jena 300mm f/4 Sonnar lens.
The rearmost element of this lens is only just below the mount, and the Joseph Schneider 2× converter cannot therefore be mounted on this lens.
The fork-shaped connector at 11 o’clock in this view engages with a pin in the Pentacon 35mm adapter,
transmitting the aperture selected on the lens via the EDC contacts on the adapter to the metering circuits in Praktica LLC, PLC and VLC cameras.]

Close focus and converters

Converters do not reduce the minimum focussing distance of a lens, but they don’t increase it either! The result is that with a 2× converter, you get the same image as if you had been able to get twice as close! For example:

the closest focus of the 80mm Biometar lens is 1 meter
the closest focus of the 180mm Sonnar lens is 1.7 meters
even though the focal length of the 80mm Biometar lens + a 2× converter is now 160mm, the closest focus is still 1 meter!

So sometimes using a converter (possibly in combination with an extension tube) enables you to photograph a much smaller area. You can see an example of such use of the 2× converter here (scroll down to the bottom).

Alternatively, if you are happy with the coverage with the standard lens, using the converter with it enables you to increase your distance from the object, thus reducing the risk of casting a shadow on what you are photographing, or of startling it, in the case of wildlife, insects or children!

The 1.4× converter

Arsenal also manufactures a 1.4× teleconverter which has the advantage of only reducing the amount of light reaching the film by the equivalent of one stop, while 2× converters reduce the amount of light by two stops. (This is not a fault, but a consequence of the way light rays behave when magnified.)

If you just want to see results obtained with the 2× converters, see parts of each of the following sections:

160mm 240-300mm 500-560mm 600mm 1000mm 1000-1200mm 2000mm

If you prefer to work through the whole lens test without missing anything out, click below to go on to the next section. You will also see the results obtained with the 2× converters at the appropriate points.

Next section (120-140mm)

To go back to the section on adapters, click here.

To see in detail how the Schneider teleconverter transmits the aperture information to the Exakta 66 TTL meter, click here.

To go back to the beginning of the lens tests, click below and then choose the focal length that you want to read about.
Back to beginning of lens tests

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