Report on Minolta lens test from ~1975!

[Malcolm Stewart]

Back in the 1970s I was using a Minolta SRT101, and over a few years I'd acquired 6 lenses. The photo magazines were writing about the "look" of different systems lenses etc, so I decided to try a very non-scientific test. I loaded my camera with Ilford's FP4, and I visited a local English town on a crisp sunny day, and shot 6 exposures each using each of my 6 lenses. I kept notes as to which lens was used for each shot, and no two shots were the same. Most of the subjects were street views and similar, and lens hoods were used.
The lenses were the 55mm F/1.7 Rokkor MC supplied with my SRT101, a Panagor 28mm F/2.5, Panagor 35mm f/2, 100mm F/4 Rokkor TC, 135mm F/2.8 Rokkor MC, and a 300mm F/5.6 Soligor tele. I had my own darkroom and printed 10" x 8" prints from each negative. I used a variety of paper grades, and essentially used up whatever I had left in boxes from earlier sessions. (The enlarger was a simple 35mm Rowi, enlarging lens was a 50mm TTH Ental II, and the negatives were kept flat using a Leitz anti-Newton ring glass.)

Each print was annotated on the back with lens used for taking the shot. I presented the pile of 36 prints to a fellow photographer and asked him to sort the pile in to two - Rokkor and others, based on the "look" of the print. He did this very quickly, and no Minolta shots made it to the "others" pile, and just one print from the 28mm Panagor made it to the Rokkor pile. In particular I was surprised that shots from the optically simple 100mm Rokkor TC made it to the Rokkor pile, but they all did.

I still have the negatives and have scanned them, but the differences shown on my 1975 prints don't seem so obvious on the scans.
Within a few months my friend had bought into the Minolta system with an XE-1.

Clearly my test was not "Rokkor" versus "Nikkor" or "Canon", but "Rokkor" versus some "Independents" of the time, so it certainly wasn't scientific, but I knew that at the time, and resulted in me saving for genuine Rokkor wide-angle lenses - which I still have..

 

[Theo Sulphate]

Did you yourself also perform this test with the prints?

 

[Malcolm Stewart]

Did you yourself also perform this test with the prints?

No - I could remember what lenses I'd used for many of the 36 shots; but I was aware of the different "look" of the prints from the Rokkor negatives. I'm sure I still have the set of prints somewhere, but haven't seen them for a long time.

 

[ic-racer]

In the 1970s I could not afford any 'name brand' lenses. They all were very expensive. Years later, my own experience and also yours, show these 'name brand' lenses are top quality and were worth the high price. The cheap lenses I used in the 1970s were really pretty bad.

 

[btaylor]

I had a similar experience. I started with a beat up Spotmatic (great camera!), I didn’t even have an auto lens on it— I used the preset lens off my crappy East German Contax slr. I acquired a few of the off brand lenses. When I got my first “good” camera it was an OM1. I promised myself I would only buy the original brand lenses for it, brand new. It was a good choice. I still have the OM and all the original lenses 40 years later, and they still perform well.

 

[ciniframe]

So, what was the 'Rokkor' look? Higher contrast, finer resolution, or, something else. How did the Pangor lenses preform? Did they meet your needs up until you did a side by side or had you always felt there was something missing? Just curious.

Now myself, if I can mount it, I'll shoot it. From a 95mm single element meniscus lens from a old Agfa box camera, to a $2, 75mm f3.5 enlarging lens on a Chinese made helical mounted for M42. Mostly I adapt these to my old Pen F cameras. Mostly I do it just to see what kind of image a lens produces.

 

[Malcolm Stewart]

So, what was the 'Rokkor' look? Higher contrast, finer resolution, or, something else. How did the Panagor lenses perform? Did they meet your needs up until you did a side by side or had you always felt there was something missing? Just curious. ...

Good question. At the time, the Panagor lenses were certainly more affordable than Minolta Rokkors which in their MC variant had not been around for that long, and on colour slide were satisfactory.
From what I recall on a 10" x 8" print from 35mm, the Minolta negatives gave me a print which suggested that extra enlargement would offer more detail, whereas the prints from the Panagors didn't offer that clarity, but what was there was quite contrasty. At the time I had a book extolling the virtue of higher contrast over resolution, and it may be that at a smaller print size, those from the Panagors wouldn't have been so obvious. A few months later, I borrowed my wife's Canon FTb and ran a similar test using only Canon FD lenses. (At the time I was limited to a max print size of 10" x 8".) Those FTb 10" x 8" prints were both contrasty and had fine detail, and possibly were more contrasty than the Minolta set - but it's a long time ago, and again I didn't keep proper notes. Differences on colour slides projected using a low-end Leitz projector were much less noticeable - it was a few years before I bought Leitz Colorplan projection lenses..