Lens Review: 1943 Taylor Hobson Cooke Panfo 50mm f2.8 Leica M conversion

The lens is for sale on our website here.

A late night eBay scroll and a just-listed, low starting bid Cooke lens grabbed my attention. I immediately hit the make an offer button and woke to find it was now mine, fantastic! It went straight to my friends in HK for Leica M mount conversion.

Whilst the lens was away I started digging, and the Panfo turns out to be one of those Cooke names that has almost entirely fallen out of the record. Taylor, Taylor & Hobson's (TTH) cine catalogue is remembered for two things — the Opic and the Speed Panchro — and everything else in the range has been quietly forgotten. The Panfo is one of the forgotten ones.

What is a Panfo?

TTH gave every series a code name, and the cine range followed a loose logic: Kinic for the early cinematograph triplets, Panchro and Speed Panchro for the panchromatically corrected fast lenses, Panchrotal for the telephotos. The "Pan" in Panfo puts it in the same family, a lens corrected for panchromatic stock rather than the older orthochromatic emulsions but sitting below the Speed Panchro in speed and, presumably, in price.

Image © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum

The clearest surviving evidence of what it was actually for is in the Science Museum Group collection, which holds a Vinten Electric Mk1 35mm studio cine camera (Model K, serial 173) supplied with three lenses: a Cooke Panfo Anastigmat 2" f2.8, a Cooke Speed Panchro 35mm f/2, and a Dallmeyer 6" f/4.5 telephoto. That's a standard British studio outfit of the period, and it tells you exactly where the Panfo sat, as the normal lens on a 35mm cine camera, the workhorse you'd have on the camera most of the day, with the wider Speed Panchro reserved for the wide/low light. It also tells us what it was designed to cover.

The 35mm cine frame of the era is roughly 22 x 16mm, a diagonal of about 27mm. The 24 x 36mm still frame is 43mm corner to corner. So this lens is being asked to illuminate an area more than half again the size of anything it was ever intended to see, and everything interesting about how it renders on an M follows from that fact.

The serial number, and a puzzle

The published Taylor-Hobson serial timeline (as reconstructed by Delta from the Vade Mecum and the Cooke Compendium samples) runs roughly:

Period	Serial range
1933–1939	c.221,800 – c.279,700
1939–1945	military production largely diverted out of the main sequence
1946	279,800
1947–1950	300,540 – 384,391
1962	579,604
after 1983	788,501

Cooke's own archive gives us a hard anchor for the war years: a 50mm Speed Panchro f/2, Series 1, uncoated, serial 280689, marked War Finish, and sold to Bell & Howell London in September 1943 — dated from the surviving sales ledger.

Our lens is 282235. That is around 1,500 numbers past the Speed Panchro that Cooke can date to September 1943, which puts it very close indeed, late 1943, or early 1944 at the latest. The war-finish engraving and the absence of any coating both agree with that, and so does the surrounding evidence.

Every other Panfo I can trace sits in the same block:

• 239610 — Flints Auctions, February 2024

• 282235 — this lens

• 286467 — the Science Museum's Vinten camera lens

• 286470 — Flints Auctions, July 2023

  
  

Note 286467 and 286470 are three apart, almost certainly the same batch. Four known examples spread across roughly 47,000 numbers of general production, all of them inside the pre-war and wartime range — which is about what you'd expect from a lens that was catalogued for a decade, made in modest numbers, and then made obsolete by coating.

There's a caveat worth stating, the published TTH timeline is a reconstruction, assembled from auction records and catalogue samples rather than from the factory books, which no longer survive for lenses made before 1947. It also notes that a good deal of 1939–45 military production ran outside the main sequence entirely, under the National Optical Company. So the dating above is an inference from good neighbours rather than a fact from a ledger.

War Finish

The engraving itself is the lenses' story. Cooke's own account of what the marking meant:

during the Second World War, when the country's manufacturing resources were to be prioritised for wartime enterprises, lower standards were applied to all non-essential processes such as painting the housing, engravings and surface polishing. All non-essential parts that would normally be aluminium or brass were cast iron if possible.

So War Finish is not a grade of optical quality, it's TTH telling the customer, in advance and in writing, that the barrel would be cruder than usual because the finishing shop had been turned over to gunsights and range-finders. The glass was still ground to standard. It's an honest bit of manufacturer's small print, and it's the reason these lenses look the way they do: flat, dark, slightly agricultural next to a pre-war example.

Specification
Year of Manufacture	1943 serial 282235, engraved 'War Finish'
Country of Origin	England (Taylor, Taylor & Hobson Ltd, Leicester)
Focal Length	50mm / 2 inch
Maximum Aperture	f2.8
Minimum Aperture	f32
Number of Aperture Blades	8
Aperture Blade Shape	Curved
Optical Construction	Anastigmat Double Tessar, 6 elements in 4 groups
Special Elements (ED, Aspherical, etc.)	None
Coatings	None, uncoated
Minimum Focus Distance	RF coupled to 0.7m
Focus Mechanism	Manual, via helicoid used for the conversion (all brass)
Filter Thread Size	26mm
Dimensions (Length × Widest Ø)	43x54mm
Weight	228g
Weather Sealing	No
Hood	None found
Original MSRP	Not established, the Panfo does not appear in the Taylor-Hobson stills catalogues; it was listed in the separate cine range
Current Market Price	Less than a Speed Panchro (prices have rocketed) £1000-2000, condition being the main factor.
Availability (Mythical/Rare/Uncommon/Common)	Mythical, just three examples traced in the public record

Sample Images

All of these images are low jpegs, taken on an M11 and uploaded straight from camera.

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Optical Performance

Sharpness

Wide Open – Centre	Good. Not clinical, but sharp with good detail
Wide Open – Edges / Corners	Falls away clearly. The brick wall shows the mortar losing definition well before the frame edge, with smearing in the extreme corners.
Stopped Down Performance	Improves substantially by f8. The wall is even across most of the frame, with only the far edges still soft
Sweet Spot Aperture	f8
Close Focus Sharpness	Very good — the painted window catch especially shows this off

Rendering

Contrast	Low. Uncoated glass and a war-finish barrel with, minimal internal blackening
Microcontrast	Muted throughout. Foliage and brickwork show detail but with softened edges rather than biting sharpness. A very sought after trait for portraiture.
Colour Rendition	Neutral to slightly cool
Saturation	Low. Filmic, and it takes a grade very well

Bokeh

Background Smoothness	Excellent, the strongest characteristic of the lens. The yew branch at f2.8 and the whippet on the path both separate cleanly with no fussiness
Foreground Bokeh	Soft and undemanding
Bokeh Ball Shape	Round at centre, clipping to cat's eye toward the edges
Cat's Eye Effect	Pronounced. Very visible in the backlit beech frame and the window catch
Onion Rings / Outlining	None
Focus Transition	Gradual, with a faint rotational pull at the periphery in busy foliage, not a full swirl but it's there

Aberrations & Corrections

Distortion	Minimal. The window frames and brick courses stay straight
Vignetting (Wide Open)	Strong. Obvious in the f2.8 brick wall frame and around the corners of the backlit shots
Vignetting (Stopped Down)	Reduces at f8 but does not fully clear
Lateral CA	Well controlled with very little fringing, even on the high-contrast window bars
Longitudinal CA	Slight in the harshest backlit transitions, not objectionable

Flare & Ghosting

Shooting Into Light	Veiling haze, the sun-through-the-beech frames lose most of their contrast, which is exactly what an uncoated lens should do
Contrast Loss	Heavy, but atmospheric rather than ruinous, the frames still hold shadow detail
Ghosting Artifacts	Soft, low-contrast, no hard-edged repeats
Hood Effectiveness	No hood found. Shading with a hand made a visible difference

Summary & Comparison to Similar Lenses

The Panfo is a lens doing a job it was never designed for, and it's more interesting for that. Asked to cover the 35mm cine frame it was excellent. Flat, sharp, great bokeh rendering. Asked to cover a full 24x36mm sensor it gives you a sharp middle, a soft and heavily vignetted surround, and a background that falls away beautifully. That combination is what people spend serious money chasing in a Petzval or a converted projection lens, and here it arrives by accident of history.

The closest comparisons in feel are other uncoated normals asked to work past their comfortable limit. The pre-war uncoated Tessars, or a Kinic or Speed Panchro adapted to full frame. Against a Speed Panchro it's a stop and a half slower but it shares the family trait: low contrast, gentle microcontrast, and nice subject separation with good sharpness that's far from clinical.

The lens is for sale on our website here.

Sources

• Cooke Optics, Classic Cookes – Speed Panchro Series 1; 1930–1947 (war finish) — the War Finish explanation and the 280689 / September 1943 ledger entry

• Cooke Optics, Cooke Compendium (compiled by Barbara Lowry) — stills series only, no Panfo entry

• Science Museum Group Collection — Vinten Electric Mk1 35mm cine camera, Model K, s/n 173, with Cooke Panfo Anastigmat 2" f2.8 no. 286467

• Delta (deltalenses.com), Taylor-Hobson / Cooke Lenses — serial timeline, National Optical Company and Air Ministry production, out-of-sequence wartime serials

• Flints Auctions — lot 193 (19 July 2023, s/n 286470) and lot 237 (29 February 2024, s/n 239610)