Looking for Full Frame Lenses with Low Vignetting - GFX

Gatorengineer64 · Joined: 26 Oct 2017 Posts: 279

So more as a whim, or perhaps an extended rental, I picked up a GFX 50R body from a local seller. I really like the menu structure, and the camera like feel of it over my A7R2. But being a hobbyist, I cant afford native glass, and was looking for advice on Full Frame Manual Lenses that hopefully are sharp with Low Vignetting, as they would be excellent candidates to cover the larger sensor.

So far what I have tried successfully is a 50 Summicron V2, 95% good, a Jupiter 8 which is very happy on this camera, and a Canon 100 F2 LTM, also very happy, as well as a Topcon 58 F1.4.

I have a number of Chinesium Adapters in the mail for various mounts, but would be looking for recommendations below 50MM, that would fit the criteria of sharp with low vignetting criteria.

So far below 50, the Schneider robot 40, works at 1:1 with some interesting character, the 35 F2 canon works at 1:1, so does the 1.2, and 1.4 LTMs, but hoping to find something that would cover 3:2 if not 4:3 on this camera..

You may have noticed that the only adapter I currently have in hand is an LTM/ M adapter.

stevemark · Joined: 29 Apr 2011 Posts: 3754 Location: Switzerland

Back in 2020 I was about to buy the GFX, but my photo dealer did advise me to first rent and test it. I have been using the GFX for several days, mostly for taking high-res images of sacral museum exhibits, often made of gold or silver. Lenses were the Mamiya Sekor C 4/80mm Macro and Sekor A 4/120mm Macro. In parallel I have been shooting the same objects with my 43MP A7RII and the Minolta Macro lenses AF 2.8/50 and AF 2.8/100mm. The differences in resolution were surprisingly small, and the Sony colors often (but not always) were preferred by the museum curators.

That said, I would go for used medium format lenses when buying a GFX. I myself have been using the following lenses:

Mamiya Sekor C 3.5/35mm
Mamiya Sekor C and CN 2.8/45mm
Mamiya Sekor C 1.9/80mm
Mamiya Sekor C 2.8/80mm
Mamiya Sekor C 4/80mm Macro
Mamiya Sekor A 4/120mm Macro
Mamiya Sekor C 4/150mm
Mamiya Sekor C 4/210mm
Mamiya Sekor C and CN 5.6/300mm

Especially the longer lenses (4/210 and 5.6/300) as well as the two Macro lenses (4/80 and 4/120) are very well suitable for the 50MP "small MF" sensor. The 4/80mm, the 4/210 and the 5.6/300mm are dirt cheap, often below CHF/USD/EUR 100.--. You simply waste your time looking for suitable FF lenses with these focal lengths.

Last week I've been travelling in Umbria and the Toscana, doind landscape work together with Pentax medium format photograper. He was using the Pentax 645Z (same sensor as the GFX) with the followng lenses:

AF 4/28mm (excellent and very expensive / difficult to find)
AF 3.5/35mm (very good)
AF 2.8/45mm (very good)
AF 2.8/55mm (very good)
AF 2.8/70 (very good)
AF 80-160 (not so good)
AF 4/200mm (small but inferior to the Mamiya C 4/210mm)
AF 4/300mm (excellent and very expensive)

Especially the Pentax AF 35mm wideangle seems to better than the Mamiya Sekor C 3.5/35mm (the Mamiya AF probably is better as well). It's priced quite reasonably.

D1N0 · Joined: 07 Aug 2012 Posts: 2495

Apart from Pentax (6x7 and 645) and Mamiya there is also Bronica, Pentacon six for east german and russian glass. And of course Hasselblad. Someone made a list of full frame lenses and their coverage on the GFX. You can refer to that when looking for lenses to use on your GFX.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1uxvvpxJ9QVFFyh0pW2rs9KBmUW9vlh-d-VnbcLDCTn8/edit#gid=0

eggplant · Joined: 27 May 2020 Posts: 516

If you want really cheap, like sub £30 cheap, you should check out some of the perspective-control slide projection lenses. They cast a larger than normal (35mm) image circle to support shifting.

Downsides is fixed aperture, f2.8 max, and need to be adapted, but it is worth a mention. I've seen them go down to 35mm in focal length, although 45mm is a common option.

From Schneider, ISCO and Navitar/D.O. Industries.

calvin83 · Joined: 12 Apr 2009 Posts: 7554 Location: Hong Kong

Gatorengineer64 · Joined: 26 Oct 2017 Posts: 279

Thanks for the comments, I was ultimately angling towards a travel friendly rig, as the size of Native Medium format lenses is a bit daunting. Hence a bit disappointed in the performance of the Rangefinders. Being honest I was disappointed that a few of the rangefinder lenses didnt do a little bit better, I did see the thread here was just hoping for a bit more. Need to play with it a bit......

Quesiton why did you go Mamiya over Pentax 645? I was getting close to deciding on a few 645 lenses like the 35?

stevemark · Joined: 29 Apr 2011 Posts: 3754 Location: Switzerland

eggplant · Joined: 27 May 2020 Posts: 516

Must also be a thing that rangefinder lenses need to not produce too much viewfinder blockage, so might compromise on vignetting/other parts of optical design. Atleast looking at modern Sony E lenses they are relaxed in length abit now.

Not super surprised that wide rangefinder lenses don't do better, but I can see why you're in abit of a bind- most *affordable* medium format long flange distance SLR.

Have you considered putting a quality 0.7x wide converter on a 50mm rangefinder lens? That would be small, affordable and offer decent quality. It is certainly small considering your other medium format options.

iangreenhalgh1 · Expire: 2014-01-07

Don't overlook the Zeiss Jena P6 lenses, they are excellent, especially for what they cost. The Biometar 80 is a personal favourite.

kathala · Joined: 13 May 2022 Posts: 129

[quote="eggplant"]
[b] Have you considered putting a quality 0.7x wide converter on a 50mm rangefinder lens? [/b] That would be small, affordable and offer decent quality. It is certainly small considering your other medium format options.[/quote]

There are no focal reducers for rangefinder lenses to evils, and the front-mounted wide converters are generally terrible, i.e. do not resolve anywhere near 40ish MPix.
But the idea is very valid; I decided against the GFX after trying SLR lenses with reducers on the Sony a7 series. My favourites are the Sigma Art series and the Canon 85/1.2 (the 50s won't even cover GFX). I put together the above-mentioned google table and listed compatibility with reducers as well for all lenses I could find.

eggplant · Joined: 27 May 2020 Posts: 516

KEO · Joined: 27 Sep 2018 Posts: 761 Location: USA

I'll post this link again to Ken Wheeler's testing from a few years ago. He tried a large number of old manual lenses on his GFX.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=987TYJGFKoY

simple.joy · Joined: 30 May 2022 Posts: 444

I‘m not knowledgeable on the GFX but if you haven’t already discovered it Rob de Loe seems to have used and compared a lot of different lenses on a GFX (even for shifted panoramas), among them some enlarging lenses and other unusual ones available for very reasonable prices, with great results.

https://www.robdeloephotography.com/Pages/Toyo-VX23D-and-Fuji-GFX-50R

He has also written a lot about that and shared his big library of sample images on a couple of different forums - maybe look it up, if you haven‘t already.

iangreenhalgh1 · Expire: 2014-01-07

On the subject of front mounted converters, the Schneider Xenar 0.7x is wonderful, it was originally made for a Kodak digital camera about 20 years ago and was 300ukp when new, so a world away from the cheap types. It has 4 elements with two of them being aspherical and is plastic bodied so not heavy. It's a 0.7x type and doesn't reduce IQ at all, I have had great success using it on the front of 24mm lenses to turn them into 17mm - the results were better than usingmy Tokina 17mm lens.

Best of all, it's common and dirt cheap, well worth a try.

Gatorengineer64 · Joined: 26 Oct 2017 Posts: 279

Lots of great Ideas here.

I pulled the trigger on one of Schneider reducers...Thanks for that. Promises to be interesting. I dont think I have ever put anything schneider on my camera that I dont like. I have a Rollei Xenon that it will probably be the recipient of it.

The Youtube guy was great as well, although I am a bit skeptical of his claim of 85 percent dont vignette badly.... but we will see.

Very close to pulling the trigger on on a Voigtlander Nokton 40 1.2, in M Mout. That way the lens could either stay with the A7 or go on the GFX.... Wish I could find a Used one that isnt 90 percent of new, but will probably buy tonight off Reeves B&H link tonight.

iangreenhalgh1 · Expire: 2014-01-07

You'll like the Schneider, I really cannot imagine you not doing so!

58mm thread if memory serves me correctly, so you might need a steeping ring.

I don't have the Rollei Xenon (one of the lenses on my want list, as I collect Schneider) but I am positive it will work well, I do have the Rollei Schneider SL Angulon 2.8/35 compatriot of it and it is a wonderful lens.

I bought a second Xenar to have a spare, and use it on my 6x9 Baby Century Graphic as the widest lens I have for it is a 65mm Angulon, which isn;t all that wide. Add the 0.7x though...

Happy shooting!

eggplant · Joined: 27 May 2020 Posts: 516

I am curious for some full resolution shots of that lens being used.

I remember looking at a comparison between this and a Sony wide converter where the Sony came up a touch better. But having owned the Sony I can say its performance was about OK.

This was also branded as an Olympus WCON-07.

calvin83 · Joined: 12 Apr 2009 Posts: 7554 Location: Hong Kong

Pretty sure it will be fun to see the combo on a gfx camera. WCON-07 has 55mm threads.

Gatorengineer64 · Joined: 26 Oct 2017 Posts: 279

Will let you know how this combo works. The adapter qbm to Leica is comming from China and no idea how long that will be.

I am taking all of my lenses back to M Mount and then either putting them on a hellicoid on the Sony or an M to gfx on the fuji.

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9097 Location: Houston, Texas

Given that the 50R's sensor is bigger than 35mm but smaller than 6x4.5, I'd be inclined to go after 645 lenses for it. I prefer Bronica, but I can see how its ETR glass might have an interface problem because of their electronic shutter. Mamiya 645 is certainly a popular option that I think would work well, but don't forget Pentax 645. The Pentax optics might be the least expensive of the lot, and one thing I've always liked about Pentax is their optics tend to be scary sharp.

Something else that just occurred to me is the old Bronica system that used the separate focusing helical -- the lenses for the S2/S2a/EC/ECTL -- these cameras had focal plane shutters, so no lens shutters. Often the lenses are cheap on the used market, but they are of excellent quality, especially the Nikkors. The biggest problem will be finding an adapter for that focusing helical.

By that same token, the Pentax 6x7 is a focal plane camera and its optics are often priced reasonably. So that's another possibility.

Gatorengineer64 · Joined: 26 Oct 2017 Posts: 279

Frankly the issue I have going to MF lenses even the 645 stuff is the 50% crop penalty. EG 1.5X times the native focal length. Thats why I am drawn to FF lenses, on the teleside its nice on the wide side not so much.

iangreenhalgh1 · Expire: 2014-01-07

The Helios-44 has a large image circle, I think 58mm, same as it's focal length, so it should cover the sensor.

Gerald · Joined: 25 Mar 2014 Posts: 1196 Location: Brazil

The prestige of the MF in the past is perhaps what explains the great interest in digital MF cameras. Here, for example, is over 70 pages(!) of discussion about adapting non-native lenses to a Fuji GFX:

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1496482

In the good old days of film photography, switching from 35mm to medium format was the way to go when someone wanted a significant improvement in image quality. A cheap camera like the Yashica Mat 124G could take pictures with such quality that no Nikon or Leica could match. The explanation was simply that the MF "sensor" (a 6x6 film frame) had 4x more resolution than a 35mm "sensor".

Unfortunately, in the age of digital photography, the path towards image perfection is not so simple. It is not enough to increase the size of the sensor, it is necessary to increase the resolution too! It turns out that the resolution of many FF sensors has already caught up with the resolution of entry-level MF cameras.

The dpreview.com website has an extremely interesting tool for comparing the performance of different cameras under "lab" (studio) conditions. In particular, it is very instructive, for example, to compare the performance of a Fuji GFX 50R with a Sony A7r IV:

https://www.dpreview.com/reviews/fujifilm-gfx-50r-review/4

You can enter 3 different cameras in addition to the GFX 50R, but if you compare it to the Sony A7r IV, you will see that the 61 MP full-frame Sony performs virtually identical to the 51 MP medium-format Fuji:

The advantage of opting for a Sony A7R is that it is fully compatible with zillions of lenses designed for the 35mm format, without having to worry about vignetting or big performance losses in corners. In my opinion, the only sensible justification for buying a Fuji GFX 50R body is if one already has a large inventory of MF lenses.

16:9 · Joined: 04 Apr 2014 Posts: 302 Location: UK

There's a ton of high quality, cheap enlarger lenses that cover 645 - very compact, too.

Gatorengineer64 · Joined: 26 Oct 2017 Posts: 279

I get the resolution charts, but I also get that a zeiss ultron isn't magical on paper. There does seem to be something about gfx images that is different. Maybe it's the placebo affect.

On the enlarger front how would you put an enlarger lens on a gfx "" easily""