Makinon Reflex MC 400 6.7 Macro. Info?

[Aanything]

I just bought one because it was very cheap on ebay (together with a revuenon 1.4/55), and because I needed something long and compact to use on my nex, but there seem to be little info about it around.
Does anyone here know something about this lens?

Thanks in advance.

[ManualFocus-G]

Um, yes I once owned one of these. It was promptly sold though I'm afraid...it was softer than Andrex toilet roll I think there was a weird coating problem...

It has that nice doughnut effect though

[Aanything]

Thanks for the samples Graham: actually it doesn't look great (and I suspected that), but the compact size and low price were just too tempting.
Also, the lens itself looks quite cool.

[ManualFocus-G]

Remember mine had a coating problem, yours might be better

[Aanything]

I received the lens and found some time to give it a go around home: since there seem to be little info around I'll share my first impressions:

It's beautifully built, and rather compact for its FL, it handles quite well on my nex5n.
With non extreme sunlight it tends to give very low contrast, and it's quite difficult to focus on the lcd (obviously).

Here are some boring samples, with pp (contrast pushing and sharpening for resize), all handheld - so expect some motion blur.
I feel it will be quite usable once I get confident in handling it, nothing exceptional, but usable, especially for web-resized images.

[DR.JUAN]

Well. Your images are a lot better than i hoped.

With some limites about the subjects, and a bit of pp, you cana obtain good images, i guess.

[Aanything]

[Aanything]

Re-tested the lens today with my new sony nex 5R:

Handheld (leaning to a wall) early evening moon shot, jpeg SOOC 1/400sec 400 iso, no pp whatsoever applied:

The strong light falloff comes from the fact that the moon was shot through a "hole" in the tree-tops out of my window, so that's actually blurred leaves.

another one, same settings, with contrast push, b/w conversion with strong (digital) yellow filter:

This one was cropped to about 3megapixels, so it should be more or less a 100% crop.


Again, I'm pretty happy with the results, especially considering that with a tripod and in raw it would probably look better (especially for noise) and would give more chances to improve it in PP.

[std]

It looks very good - congrats
And the bokeh is also interesting.

[calvin83]

The Makinon mirrors 300,400 and 500 all seem decent to me and your result confirm my conclusion. Congrats!

If you do not have a hood, buy or make one. It should help to improve the contrast under sunlight.