MC Arsat 80mm T&S 2.8 Samples & Mini REview

[luigis]

Hi all,

This is a Canon EF mount version of the Arsat 80mm Tilt&Shift lens made in Ucraine.



The features are:

Manual focus & aperture ring (of course)
*F2.8 to F32
*Tilt: 8mm in both directions
*Shift: 11mm in both directions
*Rotate: 360 degrees

The lens is easy to operate, it has an extra ring to quickly go to the maximum aperture to be able to focus clearly and compose.

The tilt mechanism allows to change the direction of the focus plane, this can be used to increase or decrease the DOF.

It can be used to create miniatures


I like the ability to play with the DOF in landscapes


Sometimes the way the picture looks is almost surreal


The lens is very sharp in the center, and very good in the borders even on a FF camera due to the larger image circle. In a crop camera the whole image is very sharp.

The shift mechanism can be used to control perspective and to extend the image in panoramas.

One good thing is that with extension tubes you can get a very good macro lens with tilt ability this is important because you can get your macro subjects in focus without using apertures that are near the diffraction limits, just tilt the lens a little and voila. And being a manual lens the $9 tubes from ebay work perfectly.

As the lens is 80mm the tilt mechanism changes the focus plane in a very noticeable way while the shift mechanism is not so useful to change perspective but yet very usable for panoramas. Stitching you can a FOV of a 40mm lens aproximately.

Summary: A nice specialty lens very useful for creative photography macros and tabletop photography.

Luis

[Attila]

Excellent samples and review! Many thanks!

[Abbazz]

[poilu]

great reviews and your pics are very good samples

[rawhead]

The optics of the 80mm T/S is that of the Volna-3/Arsat 80mm f2.8, so it is very good, and can even double as a portrait lens.

Of course, if you don't need the shift mechanism, you can get an Arsat 80/2.8 and a P6 tilt adapter for less than $200 and save quite a bit.

Before I got the Hartblei-Carl Zeiss Super Rotator 80/2.8, I had the older Hartblei 80/2.8, which also used the same optics (but different T/S mechanism), and I loved it. Highly recommended by me as well