jgaster
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The Garbage Dump.
Last week, I purchased a Minolta 135mm, F3.5 from KEH, and rather than sharing a bunch of photographs taken with the lens, I thought I would describe my overall satisfaction.
I received the lens in good shape. The glass was greasy from the shipping plastic, but I cleaned it. The lens is a third generation MD, which seem to work the best on the Sony A7R. At aperture of F3.5, the lens exhibits a nice sharp shallow focus, and become sharper all the way up to F22. It is lightweight, and small, and the coatings top quality, for a lens built in the early eighties, with typical Minolta accurate color rendition, and shallow depth of focus.
It is a sharp lens, but has its downfalls, the greatest of which are its chromatic aberrations, seen in the photograph, if one knows where to look for them. Some may claim that F3.5 is a downfall on its own, but those who say that likely struggle with photography anyway, because unless one is taking pictures in the dark, anything below F4 is pretty much useless, and the correct procedure for blurring the background of a photograph, is to shoot a longer lens, not a wider aperture.
Compared to the Canon 100mm F2.8, the lens is sharper where in focus, but has a much shallower depth of focus, and will not capture the entire photograph in sharp focus. This is likely to do as much with focal length, as anything. However, the Minolta is a better performer in the bright sun. It is all about the coatings, bright sun, and for that, the third generation Minolta’s are just better than the older Canon FD lenses, but a picture on a cloudy day, or in fog, the Minolta lenses look downright dull and lifeless, by way of comparison.
Compared to the Minolta MC 135mm, the lens is not as good with chromatic aberrations, about equally as sharp, has tremendously better color (some may say contrast), and is much smaller and more lightweight.
Experiences or opinions from others welcome.
 Minolta MD 135mm F3.5_DSC0241 by jgaster, on Flickr
 Minolta MD 135mm F3.5_DSC0201 by jgaster, on Flickr
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