a Mamiya Super 23 experiment

On this episode of Why Did He Do That, I play with another swap meet find - an all-black Mamiya Super 23 w/100/3.5 lens - unfortunately it had no grip, focusing screen, or film back. I made a quick camera obscura with an oiled sheet of paper mounted to act as some 'ground glass' and took some shots through it using my A7 II -> MC-11 -> Canon EF 50/2.5 macro focused on the paper grain at f/8. With the Super 23 sporting a 9cm x 6cm film plane, using a 100/3.5 lens on the Mamiya is roughly equivalent to using a 40/1.4 on a full frame camera.

It was kinda fun! However, I wouldn't want to be seen in public with this setup:

I wrapped the cameras and my head in a dark jacket when taking the images to get the maximum contrast out of my oiled paper.  I know for a fact that I looked very hip doing it.

Mamiya 23's lens set to f/3.5 on my infinity-ish test scene with some positive vignetting added to roughly match f/8 image below. Hello, paper grain!

Mamiya 23's lens set to f/8. 1.6s shutter speed in the middle of the day... I guess that makes sense given that the 50/2.5 is also stopped down to f/8.

f/3.5 bokeh test - I had to use the camera's built-in bellows (nifty, right? could be fun to do some tilt-shift effects with this) to focus this close.

The lens doesn't seem half bad, but then again, I'm essentially only shooting it on oiled paper - if only I could try it on a 9cm x 6cm sensor with the pixel density of a D850... Does anyone have any high-DPI film scans taken with the Mamiya to share to satiate my curiosity?

That sounds interesting, my Super 23 has a grip and film back, it would be fun to try what you did. Would a frosted glass work?

photoholiko wrote:

That sounds interesting, my Super 23 has a grip and film back, it would be fun to try what you did. Would a frosted glass work?

That should work, and would probably work better.

Terrence Miele wrote:

I'm trying a way to to adapt some koni omega gloves and some other old vintage cameras I think a good Syrian might be to try out a lens baby composer maybe some PVC tubes

There may be ways to adapt your Koni Omega lenses. If you're OK with significantly cropping the output of the lens assuming you'd be shooting with something attainable like FF, APS-C, or MFT, then it might be worth pursuing as long as it can be done cheaply with readily available parts. The mount of the lenses I can find online looks very odd so it may indeed be best to look into 'rehousing' them to some degree. If the optical block comes out in one piece you may be able to affix it to a helicoid and a new mount.

For the Mamiya Super 23 lenses, such a task is pretty straightforward if you follow E Dinkla's post in a previous DPR thread .  I don't know how straightforward it would be with Koni Omega lenses.

I'm also wondering if there's a way that you just create an adapter out of the hole camera I've seen it done with 4 by 5 and I know that you make 4X V adapter backs for digital bodies

The Koni Omega cameras I see online are rigid camera bodies as opposed to a camera with a bellows.  If your digital camera is small enough to fit literally inside the film gate of your Koni Omega (the sensor will need to be placed where film would be) then you might be able to fashion something.

My experiment and your potential adapting obviously have their downsides.  Shooting film and scanning the results would surely be the ideal way to use your Koni Omega stuff.