Vivitar 35mm f1.9, Amanda De Luxe 135mm f3.5 and SMC Takumar 55m f1.8 review

I finally received my M42 to EOS adapter ring with AF-confirm. The first thing was naturally to take some test shots with my vintage M42 lenses mentioned in the previous post. So how did these around 30 or more year old lenses perform?



The setup was very simple. I placed two teddys on a paper and placed a YN-460II flash on their right. The flash was triggered with YN RF-602 radio trigger. The camera used was Canon 450D and it was placed either on a gorilla pod or a tripod. The shutter speed was set to 1/160s and I changed flash power based on the aperture setting. Each lens was focussed using camera's live view.

Of course the setup is not ideal as the camera angle and amount of light was not fixed but it should give some idea how each lens performs. The test photos can be seen in my flickr set: M42 Bear test

The first lens to test was Vivitar 35mm f1.9. I hoped it would to perform well as I am planning use it indoors a lot. The focal length nearly matches 50mm in a crop sensor camera and the f1.9 makes this lens fast. But with wide open aperture it is clearly a bit soft. Luckily sharpness improves at f2.8 and onwards. Unfortunately I did not have Canon EF 35mm f2.0 to compare - I guess it would be sharper wide open.

The mysterious Amanda De Luxe 135mm f3.5 was next. This lens was softest of all three and lacked contrast all the way. Well, I did not expect too much...

Finally it was time for tiny SMC Takumar 55m f1.8. This multi coated lens was supposed to be pretty sharp and it did not let me down. Already at f1.8 it produces surprisingly sharp results and at f2.8 it is very nice.

I am not disappointed as none of the lenses was total disaster. Compared to their price they are good enough and SMC Takumar 55mm f1.8 seems to be excellent. As soon as possible I will take them outdoors one day and try out more. In any case I will keep them all untill I run out of storage space.