Material on the lens especially for Radozhiva prepared Rodion Eshmakov.
Miranda 24/2.8 MC Macro with adapter MD-NEX.. increase.
Thank you an_antonuf for the lens provided for writing the review.
The task of developing a good wide-angle lens for SLR cameras has always been a difficult one: the requirement for a long working distance leads to the need for asymmetrical multi-lens retrofocus schemes, which, without the use of aspherical elements, do not provide really good control of field aberrations even at low aperture. Different manufacturers in the 24th century dealt with the calculation of 28-XNUMX mm lenses in very different ways, and each found its own compromise - a successful one. or not very. Today it makes sense to look for an old wide-angle lens only as an ultra-budget solution, since modern wide angle optics, even relatively inexpensive, over the past 10-15 years has gone very far ahead.
This review presents the Miranda 24 / 2.8 MC Macro lens (Minolta MD mount), manufactured by the Japanese company Cosina around the 1980s. Today, Cosina also produces lenses under such well-known brands as Zeiss и Voigtlander.
Specifications:
Optical design - 7 lenses, circuit diagram not found;
Focal length - 24 mm;
Relative aperture - 1: 2.8;
Frame format - 36 × 24 mm;
Aperture - 5 petals, "jumping";
Aperture limits - F / 2.8-F / 22;
Focus type - manual;
The minimum focusing distance is 0.19 m;
The maximum shooting scale is 1:5.7 (this is not a macro lens);
Thread for filters - 52 mm;
Camera mount - Minolta MD. There are versions with other mounts;
Mass - 190
Design and appearance
Miranda 24/2.8 is a small lens made almost entirely of metal - only the title ring is made of plastic. In appearance, the lens looks similar to many other 24 / 2.8 and 28 / 2.8 class wide-angles from the 70s and 80s.
On the body you can see the traditional set of marks - a scale of distances in feet and meters, a depth of field scale, a mark for shooting in the IR range. From the controls - focus rings and aperture settings.
Miranda 24 / 2.8 when focusing on infinity.
The focusing ring has a pleasant rubber coating, rotates smoothly and without jerks by 180 degrees. The lens block of the lens moves only progressively when focusing. The minimum focusing distance (MFD) is 0.19 m - instead of this mark, a large inscription "MACRO" proudly flaunts on the distance scale.
Miranda 24 / 2.8 when focusing on MDF.
Of course, with such a focal length, it doesn’t even smell of any “macro” here - the shooting scale is 1: 5.7. For comparison, the old standard Industar-61 LZ MS lens provides a 50:0.3 scale with a focal length of 1 mm and an MDF of 3 m, and real macro lenses usually provide a 1:1 scale without additional devices. Still, the MDF seemed to me a bit big, although it is noticeably smaller than other 24 mm old lenses. But, for example, a very nice crop pancake Canon EF-S 24 / 2.8 STM has a minimum focusing distance of only 0.16 m, which already provided a scale of 1: 4.4 that was already quite good for casual shooting of small things. Today we make fun of the Chinese "F / 0.95" in some 7artisans, and earlier they also made fun of the Japanese "macro".
The aperture ring switches with clicks. You cannot set an intermediate aperture value between steps. The diaphragm itself consists of 5 petals and forms a pentagonal hole. Potentially, the lens is capable of producing ten-beam stars from point light sources.
View of the five-blade lens aperture at F / 5.6.
The lenses of the lens use multi-coated coating, as indicated by the designation "MC" in the name of the lens. The lens, however, is slightly yellow through the lens. In addition, I noticed that this specimen has a kind of haze on the inner surface of the front lens. Upon closer examination in the bright sun, it turned out that this was damage to the enlightenment of the front lens, caused by inaccurate rubbing. Most likely, the lens was once taken apart by someone and carelessly cleaned from fungus or condensation. With a quick display, this drawback cannot be identified, so you should be especially careful when inspecting the lens when buying and always evaluate the light scattering on the lenses.
View of the lens through.
This copy has a Minolta MD mount, which does not allow the lens to be used on modern SLR cameras without alteration. The rear focal length of the Miranda 24/2.8 is quite large, so the lens is unlikely to touch the mirror on modern full-frame cameras. Lenses with Minolta MD mount sit on mirrorless cameras through adapters without any additional manipulations.
Miranda 24 / 2.8 MC Macro from the side of the Minolta MD mount.
Together with this lens, I was also given a K&F Concept MD-E adapter to prepare the material, which differs from cheap adapters in its claim to design and better blackening of internal surfaces. However, if you buy the cheapest adapter and glue it inside with black velvet or cover it with soot, then it will definitely not be worse.
Miranda 24/2.8 MC Macro with MD-NEX adapter. The adapter is no matter how much larger and heavier than the lens itself.
In general, Miranda 24 / 2.8 leaves a pleasant impression thanks to convenient controls, high-quality assembly and discreet design. The only sad thing is that on a mirrorless camera, the lens, together with the adapter, is no longer so compact - about the same in weight and dimensions will be an excellent, bright, sharp, modern autofocus Viltrox 24 / 1.8.
Optical properties
I was very interested in testing this lens as I very rarely deal with lenses shorter than 35mm. My first and last full frame 28/2.8 class lens was Pentacon 29 / 2.8, the experience of using which pushed me away from the idea of acquiring old wide-angle lenses for a long time. The reason for this was the immoderate coma and the high level of spherochromatic aberrations of the old German lens. Miranda (Cosina) 24 / 2.8 MC Macro is a much more modern lens than the Pentacon 29 / 2.8 (aka Meyer-Optik Gorlitz Orestegon 29 / 2.8 1966), so I expected better correction from it.
My thoughts were largely justified. Miranda 24 / 2.8 MC Macro has quite good sharpness in the center of the frame with an open aperture. The level of spherical aberrations is very moderate. On the edge of the frame at F / 2.8, you can observe noticeable distortions, mainly associated with residual coma, transverse chromatism, and astigmatism. The coma is fixed much, much better than Pentacon 29/2.8. But there is significant astigmatism and pronounced transverse chromatism, for this reason, after a strong increase in sharpness in the center and edge at F / 4, the image quality does not fundamentally change with further aperture: the amount of astigmatism depends little on the relative aperture of the lens. Other optical shortcomings of the lens include barrel distortion noticeable on a full-frame camera, as well as strong vignetting, especially at wide apertures. Below are test photos taken at different apertures, as well as 100% crops from the center and edge of the frames. Each time before the picture was refocusing.
Miranda 24 / 2.8 MC Macro has good image contrast in normal conditions, but in backlight it drops sharply due to the veil. Most likely, this is due more to damage to the coating of the front lens. Color rendition in general without any special nuances. Lens glare in backlight is quite negligible.
The lens has a rather pleasant unpretentious bokeh, without "scales" and other artifacts characteristic of such "bokeh monsters" as Vivitar 28 / 2.5 or Vivitar 28/2 (Kino Precision). Due to geometric vignetting, the bokeh is slightly swirling.
Lens bokeh at f / 2.8
On covered apertures, bokeh discs turn into pentagons.
Pentagons in the lens bokeh at f / 4.
Below are more sample photos taken with the Sony A7s full frame camera.
Conclusions
Miranda (Cosina) 24/2.8 MC Macro is a good old wide-angle lens. It is ahead of many other 24/2.8 class lenses of the same age in terms of design convenience and image quality, but can hardly seriously compete with modern fast primes. Usually, the tasks that this lens can perform are today assigned to standard zoom lenses.
You will find more reviews from readers of Radozhiva here... All Rodion reviews in one place here.
Rodion
If the lens was disassembled or it was assembled with a defect, which is very difficult to identify without a reference copy, then any review is purely subjective.
The same goes for the TOU/FIVE STAR MC 1:2.8 f=24mm lens.
We don't know, and can only speculate, why it has such strong vignetting, is it an engineer or manufacturing error. We just don't know.
It may even be that the lens is assembled from two and one of the lenses is installed erroneously the other way around or swapped.
In Japan in the mid-to-late 70s, due to the growth/boom of SLR cameras and lenses, many small manufacturing companies opened around the world. It may even be that they copied the lens, but badly, as a result they got a marriage in production. But an American capitalist businessman would NEVER buy a defective batch of lenses, so manufacturing defects in Japan are very rare. So this is the work of someone's playful hands.
In the USSR, it was possible to fuse illiquid assets into the trading network, something was sold, something was not sold, something was sent to the factory for repair / replacement. The rest was written off after a few years. Usually in the USSR, no one brought optics back, you had to have something and shoot for something, and you had to get optics, if there was money, of course. Good optics diverged among their own. If there was no money, you could only go look and touch while it was on the counter. It was difficult to check the optics, the custom (folk photo-64/65) film had a low resolution (watering went from batch to batch), it was possible to find out the exact working length of the camera and lens only in the service and then by pull. Therefore, buying a camera and a lens was a lottery. For special equipment that could show the wave image of the lens or resolution in general, no one was talking at that time. For a mere mortal, these methods of control were sky-high cosmic.
Thanks for the review.
Unnecessary demagogy.
until about 1965, photographic equipment for amateurs was of good quality ... they shot on Photo-32 or type A film .. determining the exact parameters of lenses was not particularly interesting for anyone (except for photographers involved in macro photography) - the diffraction limit set in somewhere at aperture 19 -22 :-))) ... not the shame that it is now - 6-8 on crop, 10-11 on full frame and already diffraction :-))
And what is the “shame” then?) The resolution of the image that you were given comes out much higher))
Well, change the final resolution of the megapixel frame to seven ... eight (on a full-frame camera), and you will also have diffraction after f / 20)))
I wonder how many megapixels there were actually when using the domestic film Photo-32 on a camera, for example, like Zorkiy or Zenit :-))) as far as I know - the graininess of the film - the size of the silver halogen - on Photo-32 produced in the 60-70s was about twice as much as on Photo-32 film produced in the 80-90s ... if I'm not mistaken (I read reference books about twenty years ago), the film grain decreased from 16 to 7 micrometers
Take it and compare
alas, I’m already old, I’ve become very stupid, and I haven’t communicated with mathematics for a long time :-)))
by the way - reducing the frame weight from 20 megapixels to 7-8 megapixels, as you advise, will not help in the fight against diffraction :-)) recalculation of the frame from 20 megapixels to 7-8 megapixels is not done by hardware, but only by software, but the matrix of its own the value at 20 MP does not change :-))) the frame is shot at 20 MP, and the program will recalculate it at 7-8 MP - that's the joy :-))) and the diffraction limit is still the same as at 20 MP :-) )….
what?
You are wrong.
according to an engineering estimate - with a grain of silver halogen about 7 microns in size, the weight of a 24x36 mm frame on Photo-32 would be about 17,6 megapixels ... however, I could be wrong
Engineering estimates are of little use here))
ok, I'll accept your commercial estimate :-))
Grain-sand out of focus when shooting the lens itself - is it such a special technique for processing the final photo, or did it just happen from the matrix and / or lens?
By the way, the cat too.
I did not like.
don't hit me hard, I'm learning. ;-)
no money for sleeping. however, having put on the new Youngou 50 1.8 on the ancient Canon 40D, I was simply amazed at the excellent quality of the photos.
well, of course :-)))) a lens designed for a 24x36 mm frame will always give good sharpness on a 1,6 crop :-)))) so the Canon 50 / 1,8 lens - plastic to the depths of its soul gives excellent sharpness on a Canon 550D camera with crop 1,6 ...
Ordinary noise, nothing more. The lighting was not very good when I was shooting the lens itself - ISO was about 10k. After trimming, the noise becomes quite noticeable.
The cat was also shot at ISO 4k, maybe I had to pull the shadows a little there - that's why there are noises there too. This does not apply to the lens, but to the shooting parameters. On that day, I was still shooting on samyang 500 / 6.3 and sometimes I forgot to switch between shutter priority for samyang and aperture priority for miranda - that's why the shutter speed is so irrational)