Kodak Retina Ia Test Photos

David · Expire: 2013-01-25

I got my Retina Ia test roll back. There are mixed results. The focusing ring has hand-scratched distances and whomever made them was not skilled with a measuring tape. Therefore, many of the pictures are poorly focused. In addition, the camera scratched the film.

An additional issue, many of the frames have color problems in the sky (rainbow-colored speckles throughout, as though it were raining skittles. It's hard to tell, but this seems to exist on the negative, but it does NOT exist on all shots.

Yet another issue, a few photos have an orange discoloration on the left, but not all photos have it. And the severity differs.

But when the camera is on, it provides a slightly grainy image that, in terms of contrast and color, compete well with contemporary lenses. The main issue seems to be that this lens has a limited range where photos turn out very well.

I was lucky enough to be able to test this roll across lighting and focal range conditions and one universal similarity on each photo outing, the lens performs exceedingly well with the aperture stopped down to f11, f16, or beyond f16. Wide-open (i.e., anything from f8 and wider), this lens is a slipshod performer.

As a starting point, the next three identical photos were taken with the Retina Ia using 400 ISO Kodak gold, my K1000 using a 50mm Sigma Macro lens and 200 ISO Kodak Gold, and my K-7 using my Sigma 35-80mm lens at 35mm. The K-7 is an in-camera HDR capture.

As fairly visible in the results, the Retina keeps up well with the K1000 and K-7 captures. In fact, in many regards the Ia is the best. The K1000 colors are not true. The K-7 is the best rendering, but required an HDR to capture the image's dynamic range appropriately.

With the aperture set as tight as possible (smaller than f16) and the shutter at 1/500th, the Retina Ia returned its best photo of the test roll:

The Retina captured the greens and golds in this scene exceedingly well with good shadows, contrasts, and tones. Also, the DoF from near to far is uniform, crisp, and does not in any way fail the image.

A bit blue for my liking, the golds became a bit greenish. This camera does not have a polarizing filter, either. This is straight out of the camera at f16, 1/500th. Little retina, nicely done.

Downtown Walnut Creek, California. Uniform crispness across the DoF, good color rendering, and very acceptable clarity.

This image illustrates the camera's ability to capture shadows and contrasts very well. However, at f11, the camera did not capture colors well and the scene is very washed out. It may also have been due to the 1/250th shutter speed. This shot also exhibits the orange band that mars some images' left margins.

As shown with the tree photo above, the Ia captures details and colors variations in shadow settings well. Again the K-7 needed to capture an in-camera HDR to match this image and the Nikon N70 I had along couldn't match it, mostly due to the monochrome film in the N70. So I don't see that as the Nikon suffering a shortcoming.

But not all of the Ia's shots were great. Some exhibited serious problems that also exist on the negatives. These include scratching (in various horizontal planes, on almost all negatives), strange color issues, and the mysterious orange bar.

Here the orange car was at its worst. The sky, tinged purple, is also filled with horizontal lines of color aberrations.

And again, problems with colors in the sky. These last two images were captured at f5.6 or so, which further reinforces the potential for this camera to have issues at mid- and low-aperture settings.

This Ia in particular seems to have a very limited usable range. Shade or light, near or far, this Ia seems to perform well only under a limited settings, mostly related to aperture.

Nesster · Expire: 2014-02-20

were the last two under exposed, as you seem to have scanner noise on top of everything else?

These old lenses have their charm with rendering, as you note, the subtleties that modern high contrast coated designs fail to emphasize.

The three way comparison is very interesting - despite the difference in film color cast and possibly out of focus Retina the relative merits of older and more modern lenses comes across. And the digital illustrates yet another take on reality.

thanks for posting this interesting set!

rbelyell · Expire: 2014-01-31

really love the initial comparison and find it very interesting. i love the renderings i get from my retina iii. try ferrania, i think you'll like the result.

David · Expire: 2013-01-25

It's possible the last two were underexposed, yes. Since I don't carry a light meter, I use my K-7 for metering. That said, I only metered five shots on this roll, and only two of the shots posted. Usually, I just guess at the settings when there's no meter or the meter is broken (such as on my SRT101 and XG9). The two under-tree shots I metered. Also, since I had a tripod along on both those days I was able to use f16 or smaller in the shade. The second tree shot, the one without the comparison, was taken in B mode (even though it was about 5:00 PM) due to the shade and tiny aperture. So I took a guess that about one second would be an appropriate exposure time.

The Retina III has a substantially better lens than the Ia. My IIa, even, takes meaningfully improved photos compared to the Ia (and both are within about a month in age). That said, this camera, when set right, is surprising. I'll see if I can pick up some Ferrania and give it a shot. It would be nice to use film other than Kodak and Fuji sometimes.