Konica 35mm f2.0

[Attila]

Konica Hexanon 35mm f2.0 EE AE all metal black finish, several shoots are wide open , visible well, a few stop down to f5.6
Great Manfrotto ballhead is present from member Nikos, thank you!!


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[Oldhand]

Results are very pleasing.
To be expected from Konica I suppose.
Sounds like a rare lens.
I really like the camera/lens supporting frame on the tripod.
Very good idea.
OH

[Attila]

Pretty nice lens as all Hexanons, tripod support is new to me, I did receive it today, very pleasant and important tool to me, I did try today at first time. Now I can use many lenses what I could use only handheld before.

[memetph]

Does it feel safe and solid?

[Attila]

yes,absolutely.

[kds315*]

very good performance!!

[jamaeolus]

Had my copy out for a session with one of my bonsai azaleas 2hich are happily blooming right now.

[iangreenhalgh1]

Nice. I shot this rather large Azalea outside the local supermarket with a Fujinon-TV 1.7/35, for comparison:

[kymarto]

NB: Sometimes I am an idiot. The lens described below is an Olympus Zuiko 35mm f2 from a fixed rangefinder, which I misidentified as a Hexanon. Sorry. I have fixed the text immediately following this note to correct that.

I came across an old Olympus wide rangefinder camera in Japan some years ago, with a 35mm f2 Zuiko. I adapted it. A few pix wide open. And YES, for those who keep track of such things, they are post processed to my taste. Some nature shots, and some more at a conference in China with former Premier Wen Jiabao
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[jamaeolus]

[vivaldibow]

[kymarto]

[Manichaean]

I also have this lens. In my impression, it is one of the sharpest fast 35mm that I have. Pity is is rare and rather expensive (

[stevemark]

[iangreenhalgh1]

But you look at the corners with the aperture wide open, so your tests are meaningless....

[Manichaean]

[Gerald]

Close your eyes to all the shortcomings of a lens and it will look perfect for you! So, if you're a less demanding photographer, you'll be a happy person, but you should know that's not how most lenses are designed.

Lens designers are highly knowledgeable people who use scientific methods to measure the performance of a lens. They pay special attention to performance at the corners and with full opening. Much of the cost of a lens comes precisely from the effort to improve the performance of a lens at the corners and edges when the lens is wide open.

In conclusion, pay attention to the performance of a lens at the corners and aperture wide open and you will know whether that particular lens is exceptional or mediocre.

[D1N0]

[Doc Sharptail]

[iangreenhalgh1]

If all that mattered in photography was the quality of the image a lens projected on the peripheral of it's coverage then this website needn't exist.

Photography is all about aesthetics, not minute technical details that are scarcely relevant to anyone.

[Gerald]

Sorry to say, but photographic lenses are not designed by photographers. A photographic lens is the result of the work of engineers, mathematicians and scientists. The Double-Gauss lens was the brainchild of Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematics. The Petzal lens was the result of the work of Hungarian mathematician Joseph Petzal. And so on...

The main objective of a lens designer is to reduce aberrations as much as possible in order to obtain the most perfect image possible. That goal hasn't changed since man discovered, centuries ago, that a piece of glass can form an image of the real world.

With very few exceptions, before being placed on the market, a lens is evaluated using OBJECTIVE scientific methods and high-precision instrumentation. In contrast, many photographers do, or are only able to do, a SUBJECTIVE evaluation of a lens, using vague qualifications like "aesthetically pleasing" or "nervous bokeh" or the like. However, there is not a fundamental contradiction between the objective and subjective evaluation of a photographic lens.A person who forgets that will spend his life adapting crappy lenses, hoping to find a photographic Holy Grail one day.

[D1N0]

Many Lenses aren't designed to be objective. They are designed to make an image look pleasing to the eye. Objective lenses are boring. Aesthetics are designed into lenses. The way something is rendered albeit subject or bokeh is a design specification. In portraiture objectiveness is probably least wanted. You could argue that wide angle en Tele aren't objective because the field of view is distorted.

[Gerald]

A photographic lens is not designed "to make an image visually pleasing to the eye". Among other reasons, because it is practically impossible to objectively define what a pleasant image is. The "pleasantness" of an image is a subjective quality. It is up to the photographer to achieve an image that is pleasing to his eye. In fact, the photographer may be interested in precisely the opposite effect, that is, to produce an aggressive, provocative and even unpleasant image!

An ideal, fully corrected lens produces boring images only if it is in the hands of a mediocre photographer.

What a lens designer typically wants is to design a lens that suffers from minimal aberrations, subject to cost, weight, and price constraints. Rest assured that when a lens suffers from significant residual aberrations, this is NOT an imperfection purposely introduced by the designer, but a technical limitation of the design itself.

The important point, in my opinion, is not to keep saying that the aberrations at the corners are not important, but to recognize that in certain cases these aberrations can be tolerated.

The Konica 35mm F2.0 lens, in particular, was designed to be used by photo reporters who needed a fast lens. The technology of the time did not allow designing a relatively compact lens that would perform excellently at the corners at full aperture. That doesn't mean the Konica is a bad lens, but only a foolish person takes offense when someone mentions its poor performance at the corners and wide open.

[iangreenhalgh1]

Unless it is a technical form of photography, which is a different subject altogether, then all of the photography that is under discussion here is purely subjective.

[Gerald]

Of course, photography is not purely subjective, and I'm talking about photography in general, not technical photography. If non-technical photography were purely subjective, there would be no justification for the effort manufacturers continually make to design ever more perfect lenses.

What distinguishes a lens from another of the same focal length and aperture are the residual aberrations. As the lenses get more and more perfect, the images they produce also get more and more similar.

The proof that perfect lenses are not an impediment to a photographer's creativity are the thousands of photos taken by great photographers such as Adam Smith, Cartier Bresson, Ernest Hass, etc., who in terms of photographic lenses always used the crème de la crème.