This lens was put up for sale together with a Schneider Xenar 135/4.5 at a 5 minute ride from my home. So I bought this Takumar 35mm because I’ve always been curious how these slow 35mm lenses behave: were they just a budget option or do they compensate for their small maximum aperture by providing excellent image quality?
As always I’m primarily interested in landscape applications, meaning I want to see across-the-frame sharpness at apertures around f/8-11; preferably not smaller because diffraction starts to take its toll at f/16 and beyond. Testing is done on the Sony A7, my primary camera. The raw files are processed in Lightroom CC 2015 with automatic CA correction and my default sharpening.
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At f/3.5 the details are a bit woolly, at f/5.6 they sharpen up nicely to stay that way until about f/11, at f/16 it gets noticeably softer and general image contrast decreases, the picture loses some punch.
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I’m showing crops at all apertures here because it shows that the corner sharpens up continously on stopping down, from unsharp wide-open to nicely sharp at f/16. I’d say this lens is useable for landscape work at f/11 where only the very extreme corners are somewhat unsharp and the general image quality is very good.