This is a double gauss design, four glasses in four groups, two and two simetrically arranged around the iris. It covers 4x5 inches format. It is not a fancy lens but it does the job. It is very small as you can see it in the picture below where it stands on a lens board of a Graflex Crown Graphic.

It is great for shooting hand held in indoor situation with flash bulbs. That is the case of the picture samples I attached in this page.

Probably for the traveller photographer it will also do a nice companion because it weights a lot less than a Super Angulon 90mm f5.6, for instance. Good advantage in lightness against a little sacrifice in brightness. Some people will say that quality wise there is a huge gap from this Optar to a Super Angulon (Schneider). They are probably right.