If anyone ever listened to my advice I’d probably tell them something like “don’t spend a lot of money on old telephoto and zoom lenses”. The reason for this is that lens design has improved greatly over the years, and the longer focal lengths have benefited the most. For example this entry’s test subject is an old Vivitar 300mm f5.6.
One long and heavy lens.
This is a large lens. It weighs in just under two pounds and does quite a job on the tripod trying to hold it steady. If this were mounted on the Canon 1Ds it would be an unmanageable 5+ lbs. of equipment. It is also a ‘slow’ lens at only f5.6, but at 300mm it’s the kind of focal length that is suited to much of my photography. By the way the “P&B” on the front of the lens is for Ponder & Best, the ‘maker’, who started using the Vivitar name in the 1960s – when this lens probably dates from given its design. In fact their equipment was made by other companies under license. I have a Vivitar 135mm f2.8 lens that is excellent, and also a 24mm f2.8 (acquired in the same deal as this long lens) which also performs very well. This 300mm, however, is not as good.
A “medium shot” of the Nissan.
Sharpness is lacking, contrast is low, colours are dull, and chromatic aberration shows up too often. Despite this it is possible to get decent pictures with it, but you need just the right conditions – such as bright light so you can use f8 and a tripod because hand-holding this beast is a challenge.
Full image of a black-capped chickadee.100% segment of the last image. Cute little bird (with a sunflower seed in its beak), but the detail is fuzzy not feathery.With some effort it can render a decent image.A cap wearing a hat – of snow.With enough light, a tripod, and the proper alignment of all the stars in the universe …
Although it is possible to get a good picture from it, most of the time it fails. It’s hard to use too, due not only to its large size and great weight but also looking through a maximum aperture of only f5.6 is difficult for my fading eyesight. I have a Canon 75-300mm f4-5.6 that is smaller, lighter, sharper, and has better colour & contrast. Over-all I can only rate this lens as “fair”. It doesn’t even have any particular characteristics that make it interesting, unless you like schlepping around a lens that can double as a piece of weight-lifting equipment.
The weather here remains abominable. We had more snow on Thursday and now the total is around 2 feet (about 60 cm). Temperatures remain below zero Fahrenheit (less than -18 Celsius). By the time you read this I will either be dead or out shooting more pictures. I sure haven’t been doing much photography in this weather! As such the lens testing series is on hold, which is a shame as it’s nearly complete and I’m sure you’ll all be glad when it’s over.
Bleak. Very bleak.
To kill time, then, I have been watching Youtube videos on various things, including photography. I always have an interest in what other people use and what they do with it. There have been some interesting finds, such as confirmation of my evaluations of certain equipment I have – some of which could have saved me money if only I’d seen them before purchasing. In one case this has worked because the other people’s testing of the Sony 55-210mm lens confirms it is not right for me. Others confirm the the much more expensive 70-350mm would be more suitable for my purposes. Oh well. That purchase isn’t going to happen.
While I’m going on about lenses, one recurring theme was people testing ‘very fast’ lenses, many of which produced the same disappointing results. The reports went along the lines of “here is the new [brand name] 50mm f1.1 lens!” (In some cases the maximum aperture was less than 1.) Followed by “wide open it is unacceptably soft.” One manufacturer even says in its promotional material that the lens will be soft at maximum aperture and better results will be obtained at f2.0 or smaller.
Well, then, what is the point of making it with a larger opening?
Understand the “f” value is a calculation of focal length divided by aperture diameter. In theory you could build a lens with a negativef value simply by making the lens hugely round and very short focal length (not really, of course; this is a joke). The “why we don’t do this” is hinted at in a lot of wide-angle lenses that are made.
But the point is, the whole reason for promoting a lens as “very fast” is to have a lens that is usable at such a low f value. If you have to stop your f0.95 lens down to f2.0 anyway in order to get a minimally acceptable picture, then putting that extra large diaphragm in it serves no function.
No, I tell a lie: it does serve a function. It fools people into thinking they are getting a better lens than they actually are. It’s hyperbole. It’s marketing. It’s organic fertilizer. Very much along the lines of “more megapixels = automatically better camera” and used in conjunction with the urban mythology that if you simply buy the “best” (i.e. most expensive) equipment your photography will magically improve.
Nope. Uh-uh. Not gonna happen. No way José. That’s not how it works.
While I’m ranting about lenses, can we please stop the pathological obsession with background blur? You know the word I mean. I won’t use it because it has not only become a cliché, but an unhealthy fixation wherein it is perceived as the be-all and end-all of lenses and images. Give it a rest. The function is a secondary aspect of composition, not the primary one.
Torn-down Tokina; it’s hopeless.
Another thing I want to rant about is a certain photography couple who have a lot of money and even more arrogance (hey, I am allowed my arrogance; it comes built-in with my French heritage) and almost enough knowledge to know what they are talking about. Let’s say self-deprecating humour is not their strong suit. I wouldn’t mind so much if they were right all the time or even if they were wrong all the time, but they manage a mix-up with no apologies which grates across my nerves.
From these two we get such amazing revelations as “there is no aperture sweet spot” (something disproved by thousands of lens tests and which anyone can evaluate for themselves) and “there’s no such thing as depth-of-field”. Wow. Why did manufacturers put those little lines on all those lenses decade after decade then? And how come we can actually see the effect in our images? Come to that, I must be a sorcerer because I actually use this non-existent phenomenon to make sharp pictures at fixed focus points. Perhaps what they mean is “it’s not depth-of-focus” which is correct – and I have heard many people over the past half century inaccurately call it that.
To be fair, perhaps the whole problem is that this couple aren’t always expressing themselves clearly. Just to give them the benefit of the doubt. Anyway their style too is irritating to me, but if you like them by all means enjoy. And no I’m not just jealous because no manufacturers or anyone else is handing me free equipment and/or gobs of money. If you recall, I sort of did that the other way ’round myself a few years ago.
Are there any of these photography videographers that I like? Yes indeed. Here’s my top four:
Dave McKeegan Accurate, not annoying, and a nice Lancashire accent which some of you may have trouble with. (I don’t because I married a Lancashire Lass.) Seriously: this one.
Christopher Frost Nice, soft-spoken gent who knows his stuff and has a pretty wife to boot.
Arthur R A bit more raucous than the others, but not to his discredit. I appreciate that he uses a Sony a6000 often so there’s a bit of “common cause” for me. Also has a pretty wife.
Simon Another English gentleman with a real handle on classic lenses and their usage. Lots of info on the old glass.
There are quite a few others which are worth a look-in on occasion, including one lass who quite swiftly skewered Youtube videos in general and their absurd click-bait headlining nature. You know the bit: lots of superlatives, absolutes, exclamation marks, and exaggerated claims meant to get you to watch the video. I see these as a sort of warning to prospective viewers: if it says “TOP SECRETS YOU’RE DOING WRONG THAT THE PROS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT!!!!!” that’s a sure sign it’s not worth watching.
Would I ever do videos? No. Can’t see it happening. Not even with a ton of up-front money. Besides which they are all pretty much lost in the vast sea of so much to see. As such there is little chance of success. And any that do manage respectable viewership numbers also get trashed by certain other (jealous) ‘channels’ out there that seem to exist just to try and make traffic off lies like “WHY THIS TOP YOUTUBER IS BEING SUED!!!!!” and “HOW MUCH MONEY SO-AND-SO REALLY MAKES!!!!!”
There’s a kind of tradition where at the end of the old year and/or start of the new one people clean up around the house thoroughly. Everything gone through, all the garbage disposed of. That sort of thing. As close as I come to that is posting these few ‘leftover’ photos from the Pentax tryout of the old lenses. I can’t remember which lenses were used in the photos and can’t find where I made the notes. Maybe I tossed that.
Strange sky.Thin gold line.Moon. (I suspect this is with the 200mm Cunor.)Calendar shot. (Probably the 24mm Vivitar.)Colour version.Monochrome version.
There is much other news, but none of it is good and I won’t relate it at this time. There’s already too much bad news all around.
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.
This entry is about a lens I’ve already had one of before. (Wow; that was an awkward sentence.) Back in the good ol’ days when film was the only option I had quite a kit of Exakta cameras and lenses, including an Exakta VX500 – which was the ‘low price’ version of the VX1000 – and it had one of these lenses on it: the Meyer Domiplan 50mm f2.8.
Meyer Optik Domplan 50mm f2.8
As such I thought I knew what to expect from this M42 edition, which was “not much”. The one I had on the Exakta was not particularly great, although in fairness that was in comparison to other lenses such as a Zeiss Tessar and a Meyer Primoplan (the one lens I regret not stuffing in my pocket and bringing home with me in 2018).
This one is noticeably better than the first one I had. Hurrah for that, eh?
Full image.Cropped segment.
Although obviously not the sharpest lens in the arsenal, it is certainly better than several of the others. But it is unspectacular. The contrast is a tad low, but the colour rendition is accurate and there’s no sign of chromatic aberration.
Oh look: spots on the sensor I just cleaned.
Over-all I’d rate it as “good”, but not “very good” – especially considering its small control rings are something of a pain to work. It is also an “automatic only” lens, meaning it won’t function properly on the Canon adaptor.
Used Car Lot.
Right now it is serving as a “body cap” for the Pentax Spotmatic as I’ve confiscated that camera’s 50mm f1.4 Super Takumar for my shooting arsenal. But with a little effort it can make a decent photo:
Straight out of the camera.Reworked for artistic purposes.
(I’m not trying very hard with the photos because hey, it’s -35C and there’s 38cm of snow on the ground.)
In other news my wife is apparently stuck in England for a couple more weeks at least – we don’t know for sure as it is impossible to get a definitive answer about anything from anyone. She spent over 9 hours on hold with the airline one day, until she fell asleep. Other contact attempts have included her being cut off and her being hung up on. Gee, Westjet, you’re really helpful. Our government here has issued Orders, but no directions as to how they can be complied with. The province is at capacity for testing and can’t promise anything. Worst of all, everything is subject to change without notice.
Taking a break from lens testing to do a little lens testing.
You might have suspected that the Sony’s high resolution 24MP sensor is great for showing up any and all flaws a lens might have, and you’re right; it does.
What then would be the result of using the lowest resolution sensor I have available, the 6MP Pentax K100Ds? Not needing to reduce the image as much for “Internet size” pictures means you also can not increase it so much to spot the flaws. You can get away with a lot if you don’t look at a picture too closely!
As you can see if you don’t ask too much from a lens it can deliver something better than you expect. (All except the Sun Actinon, which still proves to be a very poor lens indeed.) In fairness, these images are not “straight out of the camera”; they have been processed, including ‘sharpening’, to achieve the best possible result with still a minimal amount of effort.
Are you tired of reading mediocre reviews of mediocre lenses? Well I’m tired of writing them too! Fortunately there is hope for us all as this time I check out the Pentacon Electric 50mm f1.8.
The normal lens for the Praktica LLC.
It is my understanding that this lens is based on the Meyer Oreston. Meyer made many great lenses, and also a few mediocre ones. The Oreston was one of the greats, and this copy is no slouch either.
The Nissan before it got buried under the recent snowstorm.
The colours are not over-saturated and the contrast is also good, rendering realistic reproduction. Chromatic aberration is not in evidence anywhere and sharpness is top-notch. No doubt this is due to it having been constructed in communist East Germany where the quality control manager had the authority to send any slacking workers straight to the gulag.
Good detail in the branches.
If it seems as though I’m obsessed with sharpness, there’s good reason: not only that 100+ years of optical endeavor has gone into making lenses as sharp as possible and any example which falls short of being the best it can be is a betrayal to all who worked so hard, but my own actual eyes are lacking in such quality so trying to see a fuzzy image with fuzzy eyesight is doubly annoying, as well as irritating mentally and physically.
Small but sharp.
Just how good can it do? Take a look at this tree:
A tree with something extra.
Now look at a 640 x 427 segment cropped out of the full size image:
Almost hidden downy woodpecker.
Yes indeed, this lens can make good use of the Sony’s 20MP for some close-up imaging. It can turn out some very nice artistic images too:
Before the deep snow came.
What does the future hold for this lens? It will be staying with the camera it came on, the Praktica LLC. Why? For three reasons: 1). it is the Electric model, made specifically to work with the camera’s metering system (and does not work with my Canon’s adaptor); 2). I don’t use 50mm lenses often, and when I do; 3). I already have the excellent Super Takumar 50mm f1.4 which is still a better lens than this.
Despite that fact the Pentacon earns a ‘very good’ rating. There’s little to complain about in its performance, only slightly less competent than the Takumar but a bit more difficult to use owing to smaller control rings.
Yes I know I’m doing these lens tests “all wrong”. I’m an engineer; we know about these things. It should be done in a studio with controlled lighting and the camera on a tripod aimed at a lens testing chart which would enable me to carefully count all the lines of resolution from the center to the edges, et cetera.
The only thing is that would be even more boring than what I am doing, both for me and you. Besides, the idea here is to see which lenses of the bunch are capable of producing good pictures under real-world conditions. Anyway, it’s more fun this way.
So we’re up to the Prakticar 70-210mm f4.5 zoom.
A zoom lens for the Praktica.
This is another ‘automatic only’ lens so it won’t work on the Canon, but it’s no trouble on the Sony. In fact the maximum focal length of 210mm is the same as that of the least expensive Sony zoom I’ve come across, which gives me the opportunity to see if that length is really good enough for my picture purposes – before buying what is a fairly expensive lens (the Sony 55-210mm).
The Prakticar lenses, as I understand things, came about in the late 1970s as Praktica switched to their bayonet ‘PB’ mount but retained the 42mm screw thread mount for lower-end equipment. These were made by more than one company, and the specifications on this example don’t match any that I found in research (all of which say it should be an f4). I suspect it was built by Samyang, however. This lens radiates “lower-end equipment” as it has an over-all too-light and too-cheap feel to it. Its optical performance only reinforces this impression.
Ordinary shot of an ordinary Xterra. Ordinary quality.
That’s about as good as it gets. When you start pushing the limits you find they were already a lot nearer to you than you thought, and certainly nearer than they ought to be.
This should be a good shot, but when you look closer …… it’s blurry.
Okay this lens has low contrast, washed-out colours, poor resolution, and a tendency to exhibit chromatic aberration almost always. Not good. Not good at all. Many, many disappointing pictures. Let’s try harder and see if we can get a decent shot out of it.
Another ‘ordinary’ shot.
We’ve got to try harder!
Close-up achieved.
Much better, but still rather fuzzy even without zooming in. It’s a good thing digital images don’t cost like film!
Back of the bird. (Black-capped chickadee.)
That is at least not awful. Some post-processing was involved, and no small amount of luck. Considering the build quality, the operation (sloppy focus/zoom ring and difficulty seeing to focus at only f4.5), and the end results this lens gets a rating of “poor”. It’s hard to get even an artistic sort of image from it.
Oh and what about evaluating the zoom length? A bit of a poser considering the low sharpness, but here is what I know to be a downy woodpecker in an aspen tree at about 80 feet away:
Can’t make it out and it’s not that far off.
The Sony’s 24MP sensor lets us zoom in digitally, which really betrays the lens’s poor resolution:
Today’s episode: the Sun Actinon 28-80mm f2.8 zoom.
A little background info: Sun optical was a Japanese company that started back in the 1930s and made some pretty good lenses, sometimes sold under ‘house brands’ of retailers. From what I have read the Sun Actinon is not associated with this company, but rather is a ‘house brand’ itself used by a British photographic retailer called Image. Who actually made it is anybody’s guess. Amazingly, for all the information available on the Internet these days there are still vast quantities missing – and at least an equal amount that’s inaccurate.
Photographed from the side because there is no info around the front of the lens itself!
Oh how I would like to love this lens! It has so much going for it. First of all it has a good focal length range for a 35mm camera: from wide angle to short telephoto. It has a fairly fast maximum aperture of 2.8 (4.5 at tele) as well. Also a built-in macro focus. It’s compact, fairly light yet with a sturdy feel, and the controls work nicely although the focus ring has a slight slop to it and the zoom ring needs the grip re-glued, but both those problems are from use not design.
This is an automatic-only lens, meaning it won’t fully work on the Canon because the adaptor I have for that camera doesn’t push in the aperture pin to stop it down. Works fine on the Sony though. So let’s see what we get:
Scenic picture number one.
Not bad. Good colour and contrast, no sign of chromatic aberration, and you can see the recurring dirt on the sensor quite clearly. Let’s look again:
Scenic picture number two.
What the hell happened? If you can force your eye to look at the center you’ll see it’s in focus. The difference between the two photos is that the first is at f16 and the second at f2.8. It is normal for sharpness to fall off towards the edges. All lenses have this issue: it’s a function of the physics of focusing light. Usually a lens will have an aperture where it is at its peak sharpness edge to edge. (If you look at the first image again you will see it too has a slight blurriness on the edges.) But this is the absolute worst example of edge fall-off I have ever seen on a modern lens! It made me check to see if I’d somehow missed a pound of lard smeared on it or some other blatantly obvious problem that could cause the effect. The failure continued in every photo I took, no matter what aperture, focal length, or distance was used: obvious low-resolution around the edges persisted.
Which is quite a shame because, well look what it can do in the center:
Center sharp: 100% segment of a full frame macro image.
That’s pretty darn good. Why then does it blur to oblivion around the edges? I don’t know specifically, but a lens so bad should never have made it off the assembly line.
At 80mm, there it is.
Distant, full focal length, middle aperture – and still the edges are badly blurred.
And at 28mm the problem is also there.
Hey, see all those spots? You can go crazy trying to keep a mirrorless camera’s sensor clean. Especially when you keep changing lenses. Or take one off repeatedly to look for dirt or grease on it. And no it was not the sensor dirt causing the problem: I switched to other lenses while doing this just to be sure the camera wasn’t in some way the source of the trouble.
Over and over I tried and over and over I cried. This lens had so much potential, and all hopes were dashed because it could not deliver a decent picture under any circumstances. I prefer the consistent low resolution of the Opticam and Cunor lenses to this center-only-sharp, edge-all-blurred disaster.
Lens rating: poor. I can’t even give it a “fair” label because I could not find any circumstances under which it would render an acceptable image. (Cropping out a small center section of the full frame of every image is not reasonable.)
A little preamble: many of the lenses I’m trying out here are “pre-set” types where there is one ring to set the minimum aperture stop and a second ring to change between wide open and closed down to the selected number. Using them with ‘Aperture Priority’ mode on the Sony is easy and works well; I often just set the ‘stop’ ring to its limit (f16 or f22 for these lenses) and then just dial it in to where I get the depth of field or shutter speed I want. However with each lens I have tried to take at least one shot wide open so I can see how sharp it is at maximum aperture. This doesn’t always work in bright sunlight even with ISO set at 100 as the Sony’s top shutter speed is 4000. In some cases I’ve shot under lower light conditions just to have a look, but I don’t always include those shots.
The next lens in the line-up is the Cunor 200mm f4.5:
Cunor 200mm
Once again we have a lens without any significant information about its manufacture. No worries, because results are what matter! Ah, shame about that. I wanted to like this lens because a 200mm prime could be useful. Not this one. I took pictures and then I took them over again. I checked the glass three times. Nothing helped. Particularly not the f4.5 maximum aperture. It takes a lot of glass and brass to make a ‘fast’ lens and this one hasn’t got it and isn’t. Herein I’ve tried to find the best shots it did in the equivalent of a whole roll of film.
Lilac in winter. Full frame shrunk down.
Doesn’t look too bad, right? Now look at a 640×427 segment from the full size image:
Lilac in winter segment.
It’s like that in every shot at any distance or aperture; soft to the point of blurriness. Combined with the ‘slow’ maximum aperture, slightly low contrast, and a somewhat stiff focusing ring and you have a lens I must rate as only ‘fair’. I am not surprised by this however, as I wasn’t expecting great results from a “no-name” brand lens. Colour rendition is okay if a bit muted and no sign of significant chromatic aberration.
With some effort you can get ‘artistic’ results:
Dreamy images are possible.Okay for full-frame, just don’t look close at the details.When all else fails, take a picture of the dog.
(The last three shots were post-processed in many ways; the lens does not perform on its own.)
Oh well. Another ‘fair’ lens. We’re 0 for 2 so far.
Wandering Words 