There is not a lot of information available about this lens but the information I found says that it is generally a good lens but shows a lot of spherical aberation wide open. After taking some test shots it was quickly found that the lens is very soft wide open but improves significantly by f/8.
The contrast from the lens is quite poor at the moment. I think this is due to:
Poor coatings (not very even when examined visually)
some quite deep scratches in the front element due to poor storage
Inadequate baffles and poor internal blacking / lining on the lens tube.
There is not a lot I can do about the first two but I intend to do some more work on the inside of the lens tube. It is currently lined with crinckled black paper which is not really black enough and scatters quite a bit of light. I intend to get some black flocked paper from Edmund Optics designed for this purpose and re-line it with this.
I was not terribly optimistic about the performance of the lens with a DSLR body as it was designed for very large format film which is less demanding than small format high pixel count digital sensors. However the results are not bad so far and with a bit more PP they can probably be improved further. Both photos bellow were taken at f/8.
The blackbird shot bellow has had a contrast bost and a bit of noise reduction. Nothing has been attempted yet to deal with the chromatic aberations. This image was taken from about 15m with no cropping.
User Photo Gallery - Nature
The moon shot has had no PP other than noise reduction. The sharpness and detail are not great but it shows the very small field of view this lens gives.
User Photo Gallery - Night Scene
More photos when I have done some more development and testing.