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Varotal Mark III Field Lens…The Grandaddy Of Remote Zooms

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Eyes Of A Generation.com

Varotal Mark III Field Lens…The Grandaddy Of Remote Zooms

At 30 pounds, this is quite a big boy and took a bit of lead weighing on the pan handle to help balance this. I think the lever on the side of the lens is the back focus. Having never seen one of these in action, I think the rear handle is a “two in one” demand. I suspect the small silver knob is the focus demand and the arm it’s mounted on is the zoom demand that the operator would push to zoom in or pull to zoom out on this 10 X 1 lens.

With course gearing, you wouldn’t have to move the zoom bar much to go from full out to full in. I suspect these came to the market around 1953. Unfortunately, no one knows much about these and the only on I know of that survives is in the care of our friend Chuck Pharis. Have any of you worked with these?

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9 responses to “Varotal Mark III Field Lens…The Grandaddy Of Remote Zooms”

  1. Al Killion

    Lens (not back) focus was accomplished by rotating the outer chrome knob that has the spines coming off it. Zooming the lens was accomplished by rotating the whole unit like a crank. The inner chrome knob simply rotated just like the knob on a current zoom control. The setup had a nasty habit of changing lens focus as you zoomed if your hand was too close to the focus knob.

  2. Dave Abramson

    Has anyone ever heard the story that in the UK, “zoom” was the command to zoom in and “mooz” was the command to widen out? Zoom spelled backwards is “mooz”. I got this from a famous NHL cam op who works many games in Canada. Urban legend?

  3. Vernon Swygert

    No expertise here but I saw some long ones at the Masters last weekend. Bet they can zoom a mile.

  4. Robert Franklin

    At the RCA studio school, 41 years ago.. we had a TK 10 fitted with a zoomar sliding rod that had glass from Hollywood Radio Optics. Does anyone know if that was older than this lens?

  5. Dennis Degan

    Zoom lenses by design must have focusing internally in the lens itself. That’s why there are two cables coming out of the top of the lens body. The camera’s existing focusing knob would function as the back-focus, positioning the camera’s pickup tube at the focal plane of the lens and would need to be locked in place once back-focus was set.

  6. Gary Walters

    Never used anything like that, but I recall WBEN-TV having a zoom lens mounted with a cable for support mounted center, on the top of the camera to the top of the lens housing and counter weighted.

  7. Terry Ricketts

    Way back we called it range change, on the V 1 this was achieved by sliding it along the mounting carriage. Back focus was by the normal tube focus and locked off.

  8. Chris Skrundz

    Or on a modern lens, the 2x extender.

  9. Terry Ricketts

    The lever is the range change, in inches it was either 4-20 or 8-40.

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