Low-cost lens cavalcade #7

A new year and a ‘new’ lens. This time it’s the Vivitar 24mm f2.8:

Uh oh, it has fungus.

Yes it has fungus. That’s worrying but it isn’t on the glass and there’s no sign of it affecting the images. Yet. Someone skilled with lenses could no doubt take this apart and clean it up quite easily. That someone is not me. I’ve made some recent ventures in lens repairing and … best if I just leave this one alone.

This lens gets some ‘extra’ display shots here because it has some curious ‘extra’ controls which I can not figure out how they function. On the bottom is this tab with markings that doesn’t move even when you push the metal button in:

What is this for? How is it used?

And then the aperture ring has an ‘extra’ set of markings mirroring the f stops but all in green:

Probably some kind of camera-specific auto aperture control.

This is one of those lenses with the tiny button on the back that needs to be pushed in to get it to shift to ‘manual’ if you don’t have it screwed in to the right kind of camera body. (I think this is the Pentax ‘SE’ edition of the M42 mount.) I got it shifted (which means it can also work on the Canon, by the way) and took some shots.

Wide-angle it is even on a cropped sensor camera.

Oh look: I finally got the spots off the sensor! For now anyway. Speaking of it being wide-angle:

The mighty Nissan. This close you can just see some distortion.

Colours are spot-on and contrast is good with no sign of chromatic aberration. Let’s see how sharp it is:

Wild rose full size.

Cropped segment of the full image. This lens focuses to 9″!

That is a very sharp lens. The biggest problem I had was not being able to see well enough to focus at very close distances where depth of field dwindles at f2.8 – even on a 24mm lens.

To ‘correct’ this shot I would have had to adjust the trailer.

Despite the fungus this lens gets a ‘very good’ rating. If put up against the Super Takumar 28mm you would be hard-pressed to tell the difference. The only things against it are that I rarely use such wide-angle lenses and it has that ‘extra’ control function. Neither of those are a fault with the lens. I think this may be good for landscape shots if the 50cm of snow ever melts around here. Hey it warmed up above zero Fahrenheit for the first time in many days! Maybe there will be a Spring.

Spring? Not yet.

In other news it will be a few more weeks before my wife will return, unless they cancel that flight on her as well. Meanwhile I’ve got more medical tests to take, and the temperature is supposed to go down yet again. With more snow. No, we’re not quite to Spring.