Samuli Vahonen
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Mini "Review" of 89EUR lens from local used camera store.
After shooting landscapes in September with Contax 35-70 and 80-200, I felt I wanted to experience longer zoom as 80-200 is quite weak after 160mm => I avoided longer focal lengths, even compositions would have required them. I studied a little and ended up trying Minolta AF 100-300mm F4.5-5.6 D APO (if you try this make sure it's the D-model, the non-D is much crappier) as it did seem to have good reputation in Alpha mount community.
Pros:
- Sharp, as long as you do not expect miracles at "wide" apertures - for me this was f/9 lens, outside test shots I didn't try the wider apertures.
- Takes diffraction quite well, f/13 OK and f/14 useful but f/16 start to show clear signs of diffraction.
- Image quality not totally crap at 300mm, until 250mm no degration, 280mm little softer than 250mm, but better than 300mm.
- Boke highlight shapes good (no hexacons etc.), and quality "OK" (not great but not crappy either).
- Really small (really thin and length only 101mm -> ~140mm with adapter) and lightweight even with Alpha->FE adapter (485g).
- Cheap.
- EXIF info is saved to photos automatically, without need to add it in postprocessing.
Cons:
- FE mount specific problem: weiling flare is pretty bad even Sony LA-EA3 is not as crappy as eBay adapters for non-electronic mounts - I actually had to shade cloudy sky from with ColorChecker calibration/gray-card on shots I did not include sky (I tested this with my Alpha850 and issue is not there) [sample #4 required me to shade cloudy sky to not get veiling flare over whole image]. Extreme tight zooming hood could help for this issue, but any fixed hood will not, specially not if it's round tube with no petal shape like the Minolta hood.
- Contrast and microcontrast not at same level as Contax/Zeiss lenses - requires more post processing time, and results can never be same level as with lens, which produces proper contrast.
- Boke can be "jittery" at long distances, when blurriness of boke is high [from example photos #3 boke was annoying, but luckily there was constantly changing fog and I waited a moment when fog saves me from crappy boke...].
- Front filter thread rotates when focusing, really annoying to use polarizer.
- Focus ring at front of the lens -> lots of extra vibration having hand there even when in tripod, I would have preferred to have focus ring close to camera.
- Focusing mechanism has mechanical clutch (so that when lens autofocuses the ring doesn't rotate), and on old lenses it tends to slip too much - Extreme hard to focus landscape distances when turning slowly doesn't move focus and from 15 meter to infinity is less than 1 degree, and I actually ended up focusing turning the filter ring instead of the clutch mechanism.
I would not recommend due to FE-mount specific veiling flare issue. I swapped this to Tamron SP70-300 after a week use, and my local used camera store "charged" me 15EUR for "renting", which I consider worth the experience.
#1 Minolta AF 100-300mm F4.5-5.6 D APO @ f/11.0 & 250mm, 1s, A7(Kolari v2) @ ISO 50, B+W 55 CIRCULAR - POL
Tele landscapes are challenging, there never is enough DOF, I preferred slight separation on this shot, f/18 would have been needed to make the forest further back sharp.
#2 Minolta AF 100-300mm F4.5-5.6 D APO @ f/9.0 @ 100mm, HDR(1/40s, 1/10s and 0.4s), A7(Kolari v2) @ ISO 100, B+W 55 CIRCULAR - POL
On traditional long distance landscapes lens performs very well, as long as you manage to focus it correctly.
#3 Minolta AF 100-300mm F4.5-5.6 D APO @ f/9.0, 1s, A7(Kolari v2) @ ISO 50, B+W 55 CIRCULAR - POL
Fog used to add further separation between subject and fore-/background, lens is fairly good also @ 300mm.
#4 Minolta AF 100-300mm F4.5-5.6 D APO @ f/9.0, 1/10s, A7(Kolari v2) @ ISO 100
Foggy lake scene, veiling flare control required me to shade the cloudy sky.
Samuli
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The quality of the images are just amazing !!!
