Stunning photos from the 5.8cm and 13.5cm ones. Absolutely ahead of their time, the look life like; no wonder that even though they closed the consumer camera business, they are still growing and alive. It's obvious they had great pride in the designs, and did them right very quickly. Unfortunately, the UV and HI and cheap variants may have been a bad idea.
I have many Nikkon, Canon, Pentax and Olympus OM lenses, and these run circles around any of them < 1980 and even many of today. I couldn't tell much about 2.8/100, not so sure about the longer ones. What I've seen posted for 1.8/85 was wonderful, and 2.8/35 seems highly appreciated.
I'd say the topcors, 135mm and both 58mm, they render really life-like. Nothing like the Pancolar, Tessar nor Biotars of the era. Even other manufacturers, not even close.The only thing close, but again, it is still not as good, is the Zeiss Rollei planar (both 1.8 and 1.4), but they are "about there". Topcor engineers where way ahead of their marketing.
I just won a bid on eBay for a Topcon Topcor 58mm f1.8. Judging by the serial number, (287xxx) I believe that this lens was one of the first made. It is a pre-R version, which I cannot find anything about. Hopefully it will perform as nicely as some of the RE versions that I have seen images from. We will see once it arrives. Looking very forward to working with it and seeing what it can do.
Alright, I'll kick this pig again. This time the Topcor 58 f/1.8 on a GFX body. Coverage is very good on the larger sensor.
Add one in color. I like the focus falloff and background blur. Both photos at f/4. At close distance DOF at f/2.8 gets thin and at f/2 it gets too thin. You can have eyebrows or eyelashes in focus but not the eyes. Wide open at f/1.8 there are spherical aberrations, but there is a stop at f/2 where they either disappear or become greatly reduced.
Not the best pose from the kid, but he was sick and still humored me.
Lens is capable of corner-to-corner sharpness at f/8 on the larger sensor. Perhaps even f/5.6, but typically I am looking at corner to corner at f/8-f/11 for landscape so didn't test at f/5.6. On a FF sensor the extreme corner performance jumps significantly at f/4 and then reaches maximum performance from f/5.6 and holds flat to f/11. On MF it's TBD.
