Bell & Howell Projection Anamorphic Lens

• Anamorphic Adapter by Bell & Howell
• Single Focus : Variable Diopter

I dislike projection lenses. They're usually too heavy and bulky and yield poor results. This is not the Kowa B&H, but the OTHER Bell & Howell anamorphic lens. The long and weird-looking one. Not exactly light, at 500g, the Bell & Howell has a unique feature among projection lenses: it is a single focus 2x stretch adapter. Set your taking lens to infinity and do all the work on the anamorphic.

Here come the drawbacks: this lens doesn't focus to infinity, only to about 12m, and original minimum focus is at 2.4m, with almost three full turns of the focus ring. You can tweak it by loosening the two limiting screws on the head. Even though the focus throw becomes completely laughable (almost five complete turns), it focuses down to 0.6m without any diopters.

The front threads are very close to standard 55mm, but not quite, so I just taped a 55-58mm step ring to it and everything works great. The back is also very important in terms of threading: you want to make sure you're getting one of these that has the silver ring screwed to the back of it. This ring is the key to mounting the Bell & Howell to other lenses since it has Series 7 threads and you can get cheap Series 7 to filter thread adapters. Due to its shape and size, I would strongly recommend using lens support.

Definitely NOT a knife-sharp killer, but decent enough for a lens that you can get for two hundred bucks. Holds up pretty nicely even when the taking lens is wide open and improves considerably as you stop it down (which worsens vignetting). It's particularly fidgety regarding the taking lens' infinity position, so test a nudge under infinity and see if the image quality improves. For me it made noticeable of difference.

The most natural looking and smooth blue flares I've ever seen - and that teal tinge, oh man... Flares are, by far, one of strongest aspects about this adapter. I even got a coated taking lens so only the Bell & Howell's flares would be showing.

Due to its long body, small optics and 2x stretch, the Bell & Howell vignettes easily. On full frame, for a Cinemascope crop you need to be over 85mm and for full sensor coverage, at least 120mm. Using the A7s2 crop mode (2.2x), I was able to get a clear 2.4:1 crop at 40mm and full sensor at 50mm.

The first thing I concluded when testing this lens for real is that single focus is worth nothing if you have to twist the focus ring a thousand times to rack just a couple of meters. Also, the taking lens infinity setting is much more fidgety than expected, with constant back and forth to find the optimal position. As for low-light, you CAN get sharp images at fast apertures, it's just a very hard challenge if there's any movement in the scene, requiring focus adjustments. The infinity setting on the B&H is also not so great, because past a certain distance things start to become smudgy. The flares are beautiful on real life, though. The one trick I wasn't expecting to work was when I put a diopter in front of it and things sharpened up nicely. In my opinion, the best shots in this test were made with the diopter attached.