kevin_ing

<p>The BPnS looks perfect. Thanks!</p>

<p>Thanks for the link.<br>

That -almost- looks like it will work... except the anti-twist ridge will probably interfere with the flip out LCD screen on the GH1. Flipping it around so the ridge is in the front may not work either since the bottom of the lens mount may get in the way.<br>

Any other ideas?</p>

<p>Hi. Can anyone recommend a really small, low profile camera/lens plate that is compatible with the Arca quick release system?<br>

Something like a simple square plate that could be mounted pointing in any direction would be ideal -- versus the typical elongated plates that can only go in lengthwise.<br>

I normally use Wimberley plates and like their low-profile design, but I need something smaller for a Panasonic GH1 because the Wimberley plate either sticks out from the side or blocks the battery compartment door.<br>

Thanks!<br>

-Kevin</p>

 

Hasselblad USA and David Knapman in Sweden both said they couldn't work on the camera.

Has anyone successfully had their Hasselblad repaired by camera-care.com? Or

had any contact with them recently?

 

I sent a 2000FC to them in September 2006 and Steve Serota was very courteous,

but he said he was waiting for a part from Sweden.

 

On November 2 he said that he should be able to send my camera back shortly --

and that was the last I have heard from him.

 

I have been requesting status updates in several e-mails and messages on his

answering machine since April this year, but he hasn't given me a reply.

 

Now I'm just hoping that I can get the camera back someday....

 

BTW, I initially contacted David Odess about this job but he was not able to

take it.

Does your camera have the screw mount or the breech-lock Pentacon 6 style mount?

 

If it's the screw mount, your only option is the 45mm F3.5 Mir. These lenses can be quite variable in quality, IMO, even moreso than the other lenses in the Kiev line. Quality is so-so until you get to about F8. F11 is not too bad, but corner sharpness may still be questionable.

 

If you have the Pentacon 6 mount (found on upgraded Kiev 88, 88CM, and 88C as well as the Kiev 60), you have a few more choices. In order of performance:

 

60mm Curtagon from Schneider-Kreuznach. Not quite as wide as many would like, somewhat rare, and expensive. But it is an incredibly sharp lens.

 

55mm Shift Arsat. Surprisingly good performance. Big and heavy. Rare. Non-automatic aperture makes it a bit slow to use and tends to have a bit of a yellow cast, which is truly unfortunate for color photography. But this lens is incredibly sharp.

 

50mm Flektogon from Carl Zeiss Jena. More common and more affordable than the Curtagon. Center sharpness is very high even wide open, but edge performance falls off quite a bit until you stop down to about F8. 86mm filters are a little hard to come by.

 

45mm Mir. The 5mm difference between this lens and the Flektogon makes a big difference, but quality-wise it would be my last choice.

 

The 45mm lens is also available in various shift and/or tilt modifications.

 

...

 

There's also the 30mm fisheye available in either mount. Fun, cheap lens and a great addition to any camera bag. But must be used with care due to the fisheye projection.

I believe the dark slides from the older film backs lacked the pin to deactivate the safety interlock for removing a film back from the body accidentally.

 

If your dark slide has a black plastic grip, you've got an old one. The newer dark slides have a grey plastic grip (in Japan anyway).

 

You could also deactivate it with a paper clip as Kevin Bourque suggested, but I think you have to do this without the dark slide in place (the grip blocks the hole otherwise)... so if you have film in there, do it in a darkroom.

I have never heard of a Kiev/Pentacon 6 -> Bronica SQ adapter. The Bronica uses lenses with a leaf shutter which makes such an adaptation very problematic.

 

If you don't mind going to 645, then an Arsat plus a Mamiya 645 or Pentax 645 with a suitable adapter is well within your budget. If you want to stick with 6x6 then a Kiev or Pentacon 6 body is pretty much your only option, short of a 200/0 series Hasselblad and adapted lens -- which is likely over $1000.

 

Not sure about any other medium format fisheye lenses + body that can be had for under $1000.

The 35mm film back advances like any other back for the Bronica. Wind the crank on the body and the film advances to the next frame.

 

After you've shot the last frame, push the little button on the film back that unlocks the advance mechanism. Then just use the film back's crank to rewind the film into the cannister.

I did side by side comparisons of the 50mm PS and S, and 150mm PS and S lenses on Provia a few years ago. In a nutshell: I saw only very subtle differences in color balance but practically no difference in sharpness when viewed through a 10x loupe.

Milan,

 

The CZJ 300mm Sonnar is really nice. The corners go a little soft when shot wide open, but they sharpen up nicely by F8. The lens is big and heavy, but generally well made. The built-in tripod mount is weak and small though, and supporting this lens properly can be a problem. They also take 86mm filters, which can be expensive and hard to come by.

 

There's a Schneider-Kreuznach 250mm F5.6 Tele-Xenar available in the Pentacon 6 mount that, IMO, edges out the Sonnar in sheer optical performance... but this lens is quite rare.

 

You can find more sample shots with these lenses and others on my lens test page (where I also have the 500mm samples I referred you to earlier): http://kievaholic.com/lenstests2.html

 

250mm - 300mm lenses specifically: http://kievaholic.com/LensTestsLongTele2/index.html

Milan,

 

The Hartblei 500mm F5.6 mirror lens is just an adapted and re-branded Rubinar, so my self-adapted lens is optically the same. The warning on variable quality control still applies, though.

 

You can get the lens in Pentacon 6/Kiev mount, and then you need to track down a Pentacon 6->Contax 645 adapter. Expect to pay between $25 and $50 for the adapter.

 

The lens will not autofocus, but you still get focus confirmation in the Contax 645 viewfinder.

I have a few comparison shots here: http://kievaholic.com/LensTestsSuperTele2/index.html

 

Quality control with these lenses can be variable, so my results may not be representative of what anyone else may get. But basically, my 500mm F5.6 lens is very sharp. The F8 is not as sharp, but please keep in mind that these images on a monitor are like looking at huge prints up close.

 

Lenses were the 500mm F5.6 and F8 mirror lenses, and the 500mm F5.6 Prakticar lens for the Pentacon 6. The mirror lenses are actually Rubinars that were made for 35mm cameras. I adapted the F5.6 lens myself before they became widely available as such.

 

The camera was a Contax 645 with a Kodak ProBack 645 digital back rotated 45-degrees... so the Edge shot is pretty close to the horizontal edge of a 645 piece of film.

 

The camera was mounted on a large Gitzo tripod and big Studioball head. The self-timer/mirror pre-release was used to minimize camera shake. I took about 15 shots with each lens, re-focusing between shots... and then presented the sharpest ones online. No sharpening or other image adjustments were done.

 

ps- I'll fix the broken image link when I get home.

There are probably various machinists making Pentacon 6 to Mamiya 645 adapters, and unfortunately some of the adapters are fitted with a locking ring that is too thick for certain Mamiya bodies including the Super, Pro, and E. A lot of these adapters are unlabeled and the same dealer can get batches from various machine shops so there's no guarantee that an adapter bought from dealer X will work.

 

Best thing I can recommend is to contact KievCamera.com or Araxfoto.com (these two should be aware of the differences in adapters) and tell them that you want an adapter that will work specifically with the 645E. I'm sure one of them will be able to supply you with an adapter.

It depends.

 

Aside from third party hoods like Lee, Lindhal, and Cokin; many of the bellows hoods I've seen come with a bayonet mount that goes onto lugs on the outside of the lens barrel. It's quicker to attach with a bayonet mount, and makes aligning square hoods easier since you have to be careful that the hood is not on crooked, or risk vignetting.

 

Unfortunately, bayonet mounts are usually specific to a certain series of lenses. The only bayonet hood I know of that can be used on two systems without modification is the Bronica SQ hood, which also fits the Exakta 66 mount Schneider lenses.

 

Otherwise, you would have to manufacture your own adapters that screw into the filter threads of a lens. If you can make your own adapter rings, then you can use just about any bellows hood on any lens.

Just took a look at that auction...

 

This is an East German Pentacon 6 (6x6) Carl Zeiss Jena 300mm Sonnar that has been modified to fit a Pentax 67. This particular lens is of the latest type that was manufactured up until Pentacon discontinued this line of products.

 

The new mount looks like a pretty rough machining job. You also have a nice big silver surface facing back at the film, so I would worry a bit about contrast loss. I also hope that they've machined it to extremely tight tolerances where the lens axis is exactly perpendicular to the film plane... otherwise one side of the frame will be permanently out of focus (may be able to compensate through stopping the lens down). And the aperture will be manual stop-down which makes it troublesome to use for fast action unless you shoot wide open or close to wide open.

 

That said, the 300mm Sonnar is a very nice lens. They are generally well built and operate smoothly unless they've been abused. It is a sharp lens... but mine is not quite as sharp as the 180mm Sonnar in the same mount. The 300mm does seem to exhibit some chromatic abberrations towards the edges of the frame... but these should only be a problem if you blow up really large.

 

A Pentax lens would probably be a better way to go unless the price difference is too great (I'm not familiar with P67 stuff, so I don't know what the lenses go for) or if you really want to try a Sonnar, or just want this lens as a novelty piece.

Hi, Ed.

 

The problem with putting a 30mm Arsat on a Hasselblad 500 series body or H1 is that there is no shutter in the lens. It's possible to adapt one and use it on a 200/2000 series focal plane shuttered Hasselblad, though.

Hi. It sounds to me like you are describing a diffraction star. This is an intrinsic characteristic of any lens with its aperture stopped down a bit, but some lenses produce more pronounced starbursts than others. The number of spikes of the star is also related to the number of aperture blades.

 

Here's a thread related to this topic: http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0065MN

</CENTER>

 

<P>Sorry. I'm just writing this message to close the open CENTER tag that I used in my earlier message.

Here are a few top view shots of the mock ups. (Sorry... a white envelope I had in my bag reflected in the glass.)

 

<CENTER>

<P>Mock up A:

<BR><IMG SRC="http://kevinspages.com/images/Pentax645Digital_MockUpA2.jpg" BORDER=1>

 

<P>Mock up B:

<BR><IMG SRC="http://kevinspages.com/images/Pentax645Digital_MockUpB2.jpg" BORDER=1>

 

<P>Mock up C:

<BR><IMG SRC="http://kevinspages.com/images/Pentax645Digital_MockUpC2.jpg" BORDER=1>

</CENTER>

Here's a quick report on what Pentax had to show at Photo Imaging Expo 2005 at Tokyo Big Sight.

 

<P>They basically had three mock ups on display inside of a glass case and were asking people to fill out a questionaire about their impressions on the designs.

 

<P>A man at the booth told me that they are planning to launch it in 2006. He would not say what part of 2006... only "2006" is their target.

 

<P>The price point they are aiming for is "under 1,000,000 yen" which works out to under $10,000. Indeed, they almost have to come in at that mark to stay competitive with Mamiya and others.

 

<P>No interchangability of film backs, so this is a digital-only camera. But all existing 645 lenses will work with aperture automation -- unlike the Mamiya ZD which loses aperture control with older, non-AF Mamiya 645 lenses.

 

<P>And here are shots of the three mock ups they had on display:

 

<CENTER>

<P><B>Design "A"</B>

<BR><IMG SRC="http://kevinspages.com/images/Pentax645Digital_MockUpA.jpg" BORDER=1>

 

<P><B>Design "B"</B>

<BR><IMG SRC="http://kevinspages.com/images/Pentax645Digital_MockUpB.jpg" BORDER=1>

 

<P><B>Design "C"</B>

<BR><IMG SRC="http://kevinspages.com/images/Pentax645Digital_MockUpC.jpg" BORDER=1>

That's interesting. Unless they've developed it as an interchangable back camera, I guess it will be digital-only.

 

I'm going to PIE2005 tomorrow afternoon. I'll see if I can get some information and photos of this new camera, and post them here.

I know that there are at least two different waist level finders that work on the 1000S. One has a built-in "sports finder" and the other does not.

 

The sports finder is just a flip-up wire frame that you can use to roughly aim the camera when photographing fast moving subjects.

 

A friend has the sports finder version while mine does not have it.

 

But they both have flip-up magnifiers inside of the waist level finder hood.

From his other posts, he stated that he already has a Kiev 88 which he says works very well. The Bronica would be a totally new system purchase.

 

But I do think that the Bronica 50mm would deliver noticably better results than the 45mm Mir. And at today's prices it would be worthwhile to buy a Bronica with 50mm and be done with it, rather than taking a chance on another 45mm Mir, or two, or three, or four.

Short answer: Yes. The Bronica 50mm is better than the Kiev 45mm.

 

The 45mm Mir has never been praised as one of the better lenses in the Kiev line. It suffers from extremely variable optical quality. Build quality is generally below average with lots of slop in the focusing ring and aperture clicks and movement. Sample variation plagues this lens more than any of the other Kiev lenses. It is prone to flaring badly if there is a bright light source anywhere near the field of view (not necessarily even *in* the field of view).

 

The Bronica 50mm in either S or PS version is a typically cleanly built Japanese lens with good focus ring damping. It is sharp and delivers good color and contrast. It's not surprising that you don't hear too many people complaining about this lens, because there isn't a whole lot to say. It's good. And at today's prices, it's a downright bargain.