Minolta MC 16mm 2,8 fisheye

lumens pixel · Expire: 2021-06-25

This is a lens I am "afraid" of. I never felt at ease with ultra wides, even more with fisheyes.

I bought this lens many years ago. I was impressed with its quality, both in terms of manufacturing and image quality. However it spent most of its time stored and almost forgotten.

For unexplained reason I decided to took it for a spin yesterday for a walk at the park. I used it first for general landscape pictures but found that uninteresting. I tried some pics at close distance.

To my eyes focusing under 50 cm would degrade a little bit image quality. However around 0,7 to 1 meter image quality is quite good.

If you don't look for obvious fisheye effect you would need to watch for framing, avoiding tilting much the lens up or down or to locate verticals close to the borders of the frame.

What about your experiences with fisheyes?

Massif | Flower bled by lumens pixel, sur Flickr

RokkorDoctor · Expire: 2025-05-01

I also use the Rokkor MC/MD 16mm/2.8.

In "nature" shots devoid of man-made straight lines I tend to find fish-eyes to render a more natural look than linear extreme wide-angles. Given the significant shift in centre of perspective under the typical print/screen viewing distance of wide-angle shots, fish-eyes tend to preserve the angular geometry in the corners better than linear wide-angle lenses do. But if you observe the print/screen from a very short distance so the angle of view corresponds to the one when the shot was taken, then linear wide-angles look more natural.
Hence IMO a lot depends on the shift in centre of perspective under the anticipated viewing conditions of the final print as to which type of lens will work best (linear extreme wide-angle vs fisheye).

Fish-eye lenses can be very useful for taking single-shot panoramic shots, if you keep the "horizon" level and exactly in the middle of the frame. Combined with de-fishing software like FishEye-Hemi (no longer available I believe), one can do interesting things:

Bath, with Minolta MD FISHEYE ROKKOR 16mm/2.8 + FishEye-Hemi PP & vertical centre crop:

Minolta MD FISH-EYE ROKKOR 16mm f/2.8 on SONY A7S, hand-held at 1/30s at ISO 400, and processed through Fisheye-Hemi (Bath Cathedral)

stevemark · Joined: 29 Apr 2011 Posts: 4086 Location: Switzerland

Another one taken with the Minolta 2.8/16mm Fisheye:

Nobody would suspect a fisheye lens here ...

S

lumens pixel · Expire: 2021-06-25

Yes in my pic either no one would suspect a fish eye. I do not use Fisheye Hemi but I have tried to "defish" with Hugin Panorama Editor and the result was horrible. There was so many pixels created on borders and angles that apparent sharpness was abysmal. But I am not an expert of that software so maybe another user might have obtained better results.

stevemark · Joined: 29 Apr 2011 Posts: 4086 Location: Switzerland

Interestingly, the Minolta MC 2.8/16mm Fisheye (1968) was the fastest fisheye of its time. Its computation was so good that it was continued into the Sony era, and sold until about 2020 (with slight modifications because of the "environmentally friendly" glass demanded by the EU).

There was a short intermezzo with the smaller and much lighter (260g vs 440g) MD-II / MD-III 2.8/16mm Fisheye. This smaller version is even better than the MC-II/MC-X/MD-I/AF, and uses glass with extreme properties, icluding high refractive (nD=1.8 ) glass, low dispersive LD glass (v=70) and even the proprietary Minolta anomaleous dispersive AD glass (v=82).

http://www.artaphot.ch/minolta-sr/objektive/136-minolta-16mm-f28-fisheye
http://www.artaphot.ch/minolta-sony-af/objektive/237-minolta-sony-af-16mm-f28-fisheye

Later on, the latter probably was considered to be too expensive to manufacture, and the AF version went back to the original computation from 1968.

S

RokkorDoctor · Expire: 2025-05-01

paulhofseth · Expire: 2018-06-28

The mount differences would have required quite a bit of shortening. From looking at my leitz 16mm, the R- aperture mechanics would have involved a completely different treatment than just shaving the end and maintaining minolta mechanics--

Chiyoda kogaku did make some other leicamount lenses; their catadioptric 500 and 800 did not need moving aperture couplings so cuting down the mount would not have needed new moveable innards, just a new bayonet and relocating the rear filter insertion mechanism.

Final assembly of Minolta designed and produced lenses did not take place in Germany, a hypothesis which is strengthened by the inscription "made in Japan" on mine, while Leitz liked to use "made in Germany" when costly fiinishing processes were done there.

I consulted the Erwin Puts book on this . He cryptically speaks of several production sites for the short Minolta zooms two versions, and that some of the first version needed to be discarded by quality contol in Solms. No such comments ad the 16mm; so if the zooms came assembled with working R-type aperture couplings, certainly the 16mms would have come like that as well.

p.

fotografiasol · Joined: 15 Dec 2013 Posts: 64 Location: Argentina

".... I never felt at ease with ultra wides, even more with fisheyes." wrote lumens pixel.
I feel the same way. I have a hypothesis about why fisheye lenses are difficult to use. I would like to tell you and ask if you think it is possible.
After taking several photographs with both rectangular and circular fisheye lenses and looking at the photos on my computer monitor, I was surprised by the number of objects included in the photographs that I had not seen when framing.
From these observations I began to think that perhaps the mind is overwhelmed by the amount of information in the images produced by fisheyes, because it is used to handling less information given the much smaller angle of natural vision of the naked human eye and this would cause additional difficulty in achieving a satisfactory framing.

stevemark · Joined: 29 Apr 2011 Posts: 4086 Location: Switzerland

Here's one for the nerds:

Completely unbeknownst to me, there was obviously also an MC-I version of the well known FISHEYE ROKKOR 16mm 1:2.8!
Interestingly, the lens was labelled as "UW ROKKOR", and not as "FISHEYE".

The image shown above was published in the May 1968 issue of PhotArgus. I have no idea whether this MC-I version ever made it to the shops (most probably not). It is not listed in Dennis Lohmanns extensive Minolta SR lens list:
https://minolta.eazypix.de/lenses/index.html

S

lumens pixel · Expire: 2021-06-25

lumens pixel · Expire: 2021-06-25

RokkorDoctor · Expire: 2025-05-01