Hello guys,
Back after a few years of silence ! I had a lens question and I thought this could be a good place to ask.
so...
I've been the lucky owner of a Minolta CLE and its rokkor m 40mm f/2 pair for a year now and recently acquired a zeiss 28mm ZM biogon to complement my kit.
Sadly, I've shot a couple of rolls (ektar 100 and portra 400) and have found the results to be extremely soft. One great joy of that lens should be hyperfocal shooting so I set it at f/8, set the focus scale infinity mark on f/8 and thus I was supposed to get 1.5m to infinity DOF, theoretically. Light was plentiful and shutter speed high.
But... shots are awfully soft. Evenly so, so it reassured me it wasn't a knocked out element or so.
I had this idea to test it on a M10 to confirm and indeed I got results as bad as the developed CLE shots, when using the focus scale. But I could confirm I'm getting super sharp results when actually focusing on the subject, which here was in the 10 meters range or so. All this was performed at f/8.
It seems to be performing normally when set to focus on short range, wide open...it's not displaying a massive bias using the rangefinder (altough I'm aware there might be coupling issues).
So in summary :
-set to distant object : sharp, super sharp actually, center to corners
-set to close object : sharp
-When set using the focus scale, focus is between 2 and 5 meters : soft;
Is this kind of "midrange" softness something that seems likely when both short & long range are sharp ? or am I missing the focus scale use completely ? I'll probably send it for inspection to Zeiss but I'm curious about your possible experiences.
Thanks in advance,
S.
Back after a few years of silence ! I had a lens question and I thought this could be a good place to ask.
so...
I've been the lucky owner of a Minolta CLE and its rokkor m 40mm f/2 pair for a year now and recently acquired a zeiss 28mm ZM biogon to complement my kit.
Sadly, I've shot a couple of rolls (ektar 100 and portra 400) and have found the results to be extremely soft. One great joy of that lens should be hyperfocal shooting so I set it at f/8, set the focus scale infinity mark on f/8 and thus I was supposed to get 1.5m to infinity DOF, theoretically. Light was plentiful and shutter speed high.
But... shots are awfully soft. Evenly so, so it reassured me it wasn't a knocked out element or so.
I had this idea to test it on a M10 to confirm and indeed I got results as bad as the developed CLE shots, when using the focus scale. But I could confirm I'm getting super sharp results when actually focusing on the subject, which here was in the 10 meters range or so. All this was performed at f/8.
It seems to be performing normally when set to focus on short range, wide open...it's not displaying a massive bias using the rangefinder (altough I'm aware there might be coupling issues).
So in summary :
-set to distant object : sharp, super sharp actually, center to corners
-set to close object : sharp
-When set using the focus scale, focus is between 2 and 5 meters : soft;
Is this kind of "midrange" softness something that seems likely when both short & long range are sharp ? or am I missing the focus scale use completely ? I'll probably send it for inspection to Zeiss but I'm curious about your possible experiences.
Thanks in advance,
S.