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Osawa Lenses


hebert1

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Question:

Has anyone out there heard of or has any experience with Osawa

lenses?

I've been looking for a 24mm lens for my Pentax ME Super on EBAY and

came up with this lens that I think I would like to try out. Don't

want to spend a lot of bucks for for that type of lens I may not

have any intrest in after trying it.

I never heard of Osawa, so I thought I'd ask the experts.

Thanks

Herb

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OSAWA was a south korean photo lens manufacturer and I saw once two Osawa lens made for Nikkor AF mount, they seemed to be built pretty good. Still, I had never worked with this type of lenses. I prefer buying the original items, even if they were more expensives. I can't tell you if their optical quality is good enough for the professional standards.

 

J.A

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I bought a Canon AE-1 for my wife and an Osawa 28-80 zoom w/macro was one of the lenses that came with the camera (used). A year later someone gave me a Yashica SLR and included another Osawa 28-80 zoom w/macro. They are okay for a beginner or occasional user, say at Christmas or birthdays, but a dedicated photographer would find them lacking in construction and image quality. That said, I'd rather have one in addition to the 50mm than be without.
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  • 1 year later...

I bought an Osawa 70-210 Mark II that surprised me.I own pretty good zooms from Leica and Nikon.Also some others that are on a 'if there's nothing else around basis so I have some education on zoom lens performance.This lens I tried along with a CZ 28-70 C/Y mount.

I forgot to make a list of which frame was with which lens and it came to my surprise I could not tell which of the 70mm (the one focus length in common)shots belonged to which lens.I suspect the Osawa to be the softer i.e. less contrasty frame.Both were pretty shots nonetheless.It came along one of those estate liquidation packages one runs into at ebay at times so there was not a direct value sought for it.But it came to way less than $100.00 if one would like to speculate a breakdown of the final auction winning bid.

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  • 1 year later...
<p>Osawa was a japanese lens manufacturer and most people would think that they are lousy lenses but what a mistake that would be! I started in photojournalism with a Canon TX and an Albinar zoom and the sports editor thought that my photos were fantastic and then I used an Osawa and I could tell that it was very very good. They made a lot of lenses for the Mamiya Cameras and some of the major camera companies. You must remember that in the '70's there were on two or three lens manufacturers in Japan so think about it. your favorite Nikon could have been made there!</p>
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  • 8 years later...
You must remember that in the '70's there were on two or three lens manufacturers in Japan...

 

- An old thread, but the above misinformation needs putting to bed.

 

Only 2 or 3? Such as Nikon, Canon, Komura, Tokina-Mitsuki, Tamron, Fuji, Sigma, Pentax, Olympus and Minolta? To name just a few. There were probably more lens makers in Japan in the 1970s than in the rest of the world put together. There were, and still are, at least two companies making glass to supply the Japanese optical industry - Hoya and Nikon (then Nippon Kogaku, or Japan Optical in translation).

That's not to say there was no sub-contracting, but just 2 or 3 factories couldn't possibly have churned out the number of lens elements needed to supply the red-hot demand for Japanese cameras and lenses at that time.

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  • 2 weeks later...
I hope this post keeps this open. I did lens testing about 4 different days over the week before Christmas. I attached over 40 different lenses with L39, M42, Exakta, Hexagon, adapters to my Sony a6000. I shot the same time of day at a neighbor home 1200 feet away and with a prominent house measured 3.4 miles distant. I would say 9 lenses were exceptional. The only zoom was my Osawa 35-105. It clearly went into the best list at 50-70-85-and 105 categories. Showed 5 foot wide windows on that house. It went up against some $700 lenses such as an R1 P.Angenieux , Zeiss Trioplan 100, Jena 135, Domiron, L39 Canon 85.
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  • 1 month later...

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