rdeloe
Well-known member
On a graph that had cost of lens on the Y-axis and performance of lens on the X-axis, the bottom-right quadrant would have low cost but high performance – in other words, lenses that offer lots of “bang for the buck”.
Many people on this forum have lenses from the top-right corner of my graph: high cost, and high performance. Those are well known and discussed frequently here. I thought it might be fun to share examples of low cost but high performance lenses you use for medium format photography, especially those that allow movements. Many people can’t afford the high cost, high performance lenses – but still want to get into this kind of photography. This thread can be a place to identify some economical but good choices.
"Low cost" and "high performance" are of course relative. Low cost for one person is high cost for another, and we all have different expectations regarding performance. I will draw on my non-existent authority as the OP and suggest that low cost is less than $500 USD or EUR, and high performance means you can use it to do serious work with your medium format equipment.
I’ll start this off with a nice example I’ve had for a couple years, but not used nearly enough. It's come out with me more lately as I've started exploring the XPan aspect ratio (65:24).
The Fujinon EX 105mm f/5.6 is an enlarger lens. It was the top of the line when Fuji sold enlarger lenses. I bought mine for a bit under $300 CAD, including shipping from Japan, a couple years ago. To put that in perspective, today, $300 CAD is barely enough to buy a low capacity CFexpress Type B card like the one used in the Hasselblad CFV 100C. It's enough for a good quality polarizing filter, but not two.
The lens is very small and weighs only 110 grams. It was designed to enlarge 6x9 film, so the image circle is quite large. One distinguishing feature of the Fujinon EX lenses is their elements are multi-coated, which is not common among enlarger lenses. The native mount is 39mm x 1/26th inch (often referred to as “Leica Thread Mount”). I added an adapter to take it to M42x1, and use it on an M42x1 to Mamiya 645 adapter. Of course, there are many other ways to mount this kind of lens.
I can hear the sniffing and eyebrow raising already.
How could an enlarger lens possibly be any good? Well… let’s let some pictures make the case. These are all made with a Fuji GFX 100S on my Arca-Swiss F-Universalis, using the Fujinon EX 105mm f/5.6.
This is the front entrance to the Church of Our Lady in Guelph, Ontario. The important thing to note here is that this is 27.5mm of rise on a GFX sensor. I had to use f/16 to get the very top in reasonable shape, which lost me some detail. However, this was a grab shot on the way back to the car. With more care to focus and alignment, the f/11 version should have been fine everywhere.
Like repro lenses, good enlarger lenses have a nice flat field and low distortion. This little Fujinon is no exception. There's a parking garage in Guelph that provides a very nice test scene for exploring distortion behaviour. This example image looks quite promising as an uncorrected single frame. Except, this is actually a mosaic made by stitching together nine images made with shifts that covered 25mm left and right and 20mm up and down. This is straight from the camera after constraining the crop; I made no corrections for distortion or light falloff. Image quality in the extreme corners in this huge mosaic is not good enough, and light falloff is starting to darken the corners. This is more shift than the lens can handle at f/9; if this was "for real" I'd have to use f/13 or f/16. However, it's important to note that this is also the maximum shift my F-Universalis is designed to handle. I have never needed to make an image like this, and doubt I ever will.
Enlarger lenses are usually passed over as taking lenses for general photography because, the story goes, they're no good at infinity. I've used a lot of different enlarger lenses and compared their infinity performance to taking lenses with the same focal length. It's fair to say that enlarger lenses are weakest at long distances. But their slightly reduced infinity performance may not be photographically significant. This scene is another location I use when I'm evaluating how a new lens does. The focus is middle distance, and I used 25mm of left and right shift to create this flat-stitched panorama.
At 100%, not too shabby for an enlarger lens... If you're used to the quality you get from your Rodenstock HR Diagaron-SW 138mm f/6.5, you might wrinkle your nose at these results. But remember, that 138mm costs 60 times what I paid for my little Fujinon. In a bang for the buck contest, the Fujinon wins.
I have lenses that are sharper than my Fujinon EX 105mm f/5.6, but not at this focal length, and not in this size. At 110 grams, I can leave this 105mm EX lens in my pack and forget it's there until I need something that has a huge, good quality image circle that allows me to make enormously detailed panoramas, or shift as much as is physically possible on my F-Universalis.
As a final note on bang for the buck, the EX 105mm is part of a series of EX lenses. I used to own (and stupidly sold) the 75mm EX lens, and it might even be a bit sharper. I never owned the 90mm EX because I like my Schneider-Kreuznach APO Componon HM 90mm f/4.5, but I've read reports that suggests the 90mm might be the best of the bunch.
What's your favourite bang for the buck lens?
Many people on this forum have lenses from the top-right corner of my graph: high cost, and high performance. Those are well known and discussed frequently here. I thought it might be fun to share examples of low cost but high performance lenses you use for medium format photography, especially those that allow movements. Many people can’t afford the high cost, high performance lenses – but still want to get into this kind of photography. This thread can be a place to identify some economical but good choices.
"Low cost" and "high performance" are of course relative. Low cost for one person is high cost for another, and we all have different expectations regarding performance. I will draw on my non-existent authority as the OP and suggest that low cost is less than $500 USD or EUR, and high performance means you can use it to do serious work with your medium format equipment.
I’ll start this off with a nice example I’ve had for a couple years, but not used nearly enough. It's come out with me more lately as I've started exploring the XPan aspect ratio (65:24).
The Fujinon EX 105mm f/5.6 is an enlarger lens. It was the top of the line when Fuji sold enlarger lenses. I bought mine for a bit under $300 CAD, including shipping from Japan, a couple years ago. To put that in perspective, today, $300 CAD is barely enough to buy a low capacity CFexpress Type B card like the one used in the Hasselblad CFV 100C. It's enough for a good quality polarizing filter, but not two.
The lens is very small and weighs only 110 grams. It was designed to enlarge 6x9 film, so the image circle is quite large. One distinguishing feature of the Fujinon EX lenses is their elements are multi-coated, which is not common among enlarger lenses. The native mount is 39mm x 1/26th inch (often referred to as “Leica Thread Mount”). I added an adapter to take it to M42x1, and use it on an M42x1 to Mamiya 645 adapter. Of course, there are many other ways to mount this kind of lens.
I can hear the sniffing and eyebrow raising already.
How could an enlarger lens possibly be any good? Well… let’s let some pictures make the case. These are all made with a Fuji GFX 100S on my Arca-Swiss F-Universalis, using the Fujinon EX 105mm f/5.6.This is the front entrance to the Church of Our Lady in Guelph, Ontario. The important thing to note here is that this is 27.5mm of rise on a GFX sensor. I had to use f/16 to get the very top in reasonable shape, which lost me some detail. However, this was a grab shot on the way back to the car. With more care to focus and alignment, the f/11 version should have been fine everywhere.
Like repro lenses, good enlarger lenses have a nice flat field and low distortion. This little Fujinon is no exception. There's a parking garage in Guelph that provides a very nice test scene for exploring distortion behaviour. This example image looks quite promising as an uncorrected single frame. Except, this is actually a mosaic made by stitching together nine images made with shifts that covered 25mm left and right and 20mm up and down. This is straight from the camera after constraining the crop; I made no corrections for distortion or light falloff. Image quality in the extreme corners in this huge mosaic is not good enough, and light falloff is starting to darken the corners. This is more shift than the lens can handle at f/9; if this was "for real" I'd have to use f/13 or f/16. However, it's important to note that this is also the maximum shift my F-Universalis is designed to handle. I have never needed to make an image like this, and doubt I ever will.
Enlarger lenses are usually passed over as taking lenses for general photography because, the story goes, they're no good at infinity. I've used a lot of different enlarger lenses and compared their infinity performance to taking lenses with the same focal length. It's fair to say that enlarger lenses are weakest at long distances. But their slightly reduced infinity performance may not be photographically significant. This scene is another location I use when I'm evaluating how a new lens does. The focus is middle distance, and I used 25mm of left and right shift to create this flat-stitched panorama.
At 100%, not too shabby for an enlarger lens... If you're used to the quality you get from your Rodenstock HR Diagaron-SW 138mm f/6.5, you might wrinkle your nose at these results. But remember, that 138mm costs 60 times what I paid for my little Fujinon. In a bang for the buck contest, the Fujinon wins.
I have lenses that are sharper than my Fujinon EX 105mm f/5.6, but not at this focal length, and not in this size. At 110 grams, I can leave this 105mm EX lens in my pack and forget it's there until I need something that has a huge, good quality image circle that allows me to make enormously detailed panoramas, or shift as much as is physically possible on my F-Universalis.
As a final note on bang for the buck, the EX 105mm is part of a series of EX lenses. I used to own (and stupidly sold) the 75mm EX lens, and it might even be a bit sharper. I never owned the 90mm EX because I like my Schneider-Kreuznach APO Componon HM 90mm f/4.5, but I've read reports that suggests the 90mm might be the best of the bunch.
What's your favourite bang for the buck lens?
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