Descriptions, pictures, tests, usage and other information on lenses, often from Minolta but also from other manufacturers. Pictures, tests and opinions are purely my own.
If I’m happy with a lens, it means that a) it fulfills my needs which may be different from yours and b) it only proves that it’s possible to get a good sample, which doesn’t mean you’ll get or have one. Image quality can vary a lot between different samples!
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?
Did some acquisitons of late in the category of bellows lenses.
A Schneider-Kreuznach Xenar 135mm 1:4.5 in M39 mount. Its serial number indicates that it was produced around 1960.
Last week I was able to acquire the less common version of the Minolta MD Zoom 35-70mm 1:3.5, the plain MD version without the macro setting and a closest focussing distance of 1m, which explains why this version wasn’t very popular: 1m is inconveniently long, especially for use at a 35mm focal length.
Two lenses have been added to my collection and therefore to my Minolta lenses website and the lenses galleries, click on the pictures below to go there.
For some time already I’m struggling to get a really good 20mm lens for my Sony A7. “OK, and so you buy an old Vivitar 20mm? What are you thinking?” Yeah, I know, just took a gamble with this one. It appeared on eBay, I set a maximum bid of some 50 euros on Auctionsniper and forgot about it. Lo and behold, I won it for 25 euros!
Continue reading “In search of a useable 20mm lens – Vivitar 20mm 1:3.8 by Kiron”
Yesterday I struck a deal for a black Minolta SR-T 303b.
That’s the question. Do I use a shift lens or a conventional lens and apply transforms later in Lightroom? Continue reading “To shift or not to shift?”
For years and years I’ve been a fan of shift lenses. You know, those lenses that allow you to get a building in the picture from bottom to top without falling verticals and without an empty foreground filling up half the frame.
But their geometric distortion started to bother me. Continue reading “Shift lenses: are they still viable?”
