Bring distinctive look to photos with Lomography Petzval Portrait lens

Lomography is well known for promoting exotic cameras and accessories. In their latest campaign Kickstarter, they bring the centuries-old Petzval lens back into production. Keeping the look and function much like the originals, new lenses will be available in both Canon EF- and Nikon F- mounts. The Petzval lenses are famous for their distinctive swirled bokeh, where only central part of the image in sharp focus. Petzval lenses had the widest apertures available at the time. The New Lomography Petzval portrait lenses are planned to launch at $499. However, a new-old Petzval can be yours for a mere $300 if you contribute to Lomography’s Kickstarter project. The New lenses have few modern design updates, including a larger f/2.2 maximum aperture. The Russian lens maker Zenit also has partnered with Lomography to produce the lenses.

Press release:

Invented in 1840, Reloaded in 2013 by Lomography and Zenit: The New Petzval (D)SLR Art Lens

The Comeback of the Year: the first and greatest portrait glas lens of all times, reinvented & reengineered for your nowadays Canon and Nikon (D)SLR Cameras!
Character matters: extreme sharp, fine and crispy, strong colour saturation, tasty swirly bokeh effect, artful vignetting, large aperture/narrow depth of field
A totally distinctive look of photos: play the moment with manual focusing, depth of field, swirley effects and other Petzval lens specialties – far beyond photoshop and any filters!

The comeback of the year

Zenit and Lomography engineers redraw, re-calculated and re-measured the original 1840 Petzval lens to make it work for your modern (D)SLR – cameras. With the same unique features as the original lens – swirly bokeh effect, sharpness, large aperture and high contrast – the new design will be compatible with analogue and digital cameras! The Petzval lens is available for pre-order exclusively on Kickstarter.com, a platform to fund product innovation ideas.
With your funding you help us to bring back this fantastic lens for a whole new generation of photographers and film makers in the 21st century.

Character matters

Re-create the original and amazing looking 175 year old swirly bokeh effect with your modern SLR camera! The lens made out of Russian glass has a large f2.2 aperture, narrow depth of field, field curvature, with an extremely high resolution in the focus area, making the objects in focus crisp and sharp, while elements out of focus get blurry and swirl away like it was never seen before. While the original lens was only optimized for black and white photography, the new Petzval lens is a high quality multi coated lens to ensure great performance in nowadays colour analogue and digital cameras!

A totally distinctive look of photos

Filters go home! The Petzval’s sharp and blurry distinctive swirly bokeh effect is impossible to reproduce with any filters or computer programs. Furthermore the lens has great features such as high colour saturation and contrast as well as a large aperture, close to large format photography! And as the Petzval lens is compatible with all Nikon F and Canon EF mount analogue and digital SLR cameras, you can now get the unique Petzval look on film, pixel images and even video! Say goodbye to complicated post-production retouching!
See photos taken with the first working prototype of our New Petzval Lens here.

Technical specifications