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Legacy lens on NX1: Minolta MD 70-210 F4

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MarkvandeVen

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As a happy owner of my NX1 with 16-50 lens I'm still recovering from the investment, lol. So before diving into the 50-150S, I decided to give mounting an old lens from my Dad's Minolta XG-M set a try.

In this case, a Minolta MD 70-210 F4 lens. Mounted on the NX1, it looks like this:




Minolta MD 70-210 F4 on NX1

The 'pump-zoom' lens is fun to use. For some reason, aiming at birds feels like playing duck hunt on the NES again.

I just did two simple shots in my backyard at the Magnolia tree to see what it would look like. Both were shot at F5.6 if I remember correctly.

Out of camera, (50% scaledown) the shots looked like this:









Looking at the histogram of both it's quite easy to see that the contrast is limited. That may be due to my limited skills in selecting the settings, but I definitely feel that the lens is losing some contrast. It's quite easy to correct in Lightroom though.





I noticed really, really bad CA in Lightroom RAW OOC. I've tried to correct it in the processed shot. But I'm using just the samsung RAW files in lightroom, should I have converted these to DNG first? Or is it just the lens?

Even though I had this issue with CA and Contrast, I'm still quite happy to have a zoom lens in my bag for the price of a $11 adapter. Any thoughts?
 

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Do you use the latest LR? Former versions introduced ca with nx1.
 
tecnoworld said:
Do you use the latest LR? Former versions introduced ca with nx1.
Click to expand...
LR 5.7.1 / Camera Raw 8.7.1

Maybe I should try to convert to DNG and compare the results.
 
Get a good deep hood for your lens, most of the old ones suffer quite a bit from loss of contrast when the light source is in front of the lens but outside of view. If it has a built in hood ignore it, it's more of a joke than a useful hood.
 
otto k said:
Get a good deep hood for your lens, most of the old ones suffer quite a bit from loss of contrast when the light source is in front of the lens but outside of view. If it has a built in hood ignore it, it's more of a joke than a useful hood.
Click to expand...
Interesting! I didn't put a hood on (shot as shown in the picture) in this case because the sun was already low and on the opposite side. I do have one so I'll give that a try. Well, when the sun is back... :-)

Thanks for the suggestion!
 
I've been using old Pentax lenses on my NX1 and found some of the same problems you did.

Even with the latest version of LR and ACR, you still have to convert to DNG first or you will have CA problems. Do the comparison you mentioned and you'll see the problems immediately.
 
Perhaps the nx1 sensor is more demanding that previous ones? I used several old lenses on nx100,200 and 300.

Probably the best results were with nx100.

On nx1 I just tried konika hexanon 57/1.4, but only for testing peaking during video with a manual lens, so I didn't shoot pictures nor examined the results.
 
tecnoworld said:
Perhaps the nx1 sensor is more demanding that previous ones? I used several old lenses on nx100,200 and 300.

Probably the best results were with nx100.

On nx1 I just tried konika hexanon 57/1.4, but only for testing peaking during video with a manual lens, so I didn't shoot pictures nor examined the results.
Click to expand...
It definitely is. Still though, many older lenses aren't great on contrast regardless. CA will be more apparent viewing at 100% with smaller pixels as it will fill more pixels in width even if all else is the same and there is not actually more CA. The older lenses I've tried on my NX300 all have these problems to a greater or lesser degree.
 
old lenses are known for less contrast due to less coating and uncorrected lenses.
 
I shouldn't have said "problem." I just changed my expectation of what I'll use the lens for once I saw how it looks. It's not bad, just different than what I was expecting.
 
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