The first eight photos were shot with my MX and a roll of Tri-X 400. They were scanned with my Minolta Dimage Scan Dual III, "auto-levels"-ed in Photoshop, and resized to 700 pixels wide so I don't kill my allotted website space. I didn't realize it when I was shooting, but my finger managed to get into the corner of a few of the shots. I don't remember the aperture settings for each, but they were probably f11 or f16.
One thing I should note about this lens: the aperture is not a normal bladed aperture. There appears to be a thin piece of metal with four progressively smaller holes cut into it that rotates as you turn the aperture ring. I initially thought perfectly round apertures like these would provide for very good results (as my Leica-freak friends like to point out the half-million aperture blades in their lenses, forming a better circle than other brands' lenses), but then I saw the lack of sharpness everywhere but the center of each photo.
Today I tried the lens on my *istD to see how the sharpness and DOF looked at each aperture setting (f11, 16, 22, and 32).
The bottom four photos are from this test. NOTE: These photos are not re-sized at all, and are therefore around 2 megabytes each. I did this so anyone here could take a look at the full-res image if they wanted to. I should have found a better scene to shoot, but at the time I was mostly interested in the sharpness falloff at the corners.
http://www.newpixel.net/special/fishy/fishy.html
Conclusion: this is a fun lens, due to its compactness (it's essentially a pancake lens), but not particularly good for digital photography. With good ol' Tri-X, however, it produced some really cool artistic effects. I'm going to have to shoot a couple more rolls and see what I can get from it.
John Celio
-- http://www.neovenator.com http://www.newpixel.net
AIM: Neopifex
"Hey, I'm an artist. I can do whatever I want and pretend I'm making a statement."
