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 p.78 #6 · Adapting Lenses to the Fuji GFX | |
Peter Figen wrote:
I'm also using the Contax 120mm f/4 Macro, or is it Makro. Fabulous lens with less than zero backlash in its focusing helicoid and goes to 1:1, unlike the Fuji 120 macro. The only thing sharper is likely the Rodenstock 105, but that's a different animal altogether. There seem to be plenty of these available on eBay in the $800-$1000 range. I found mine from Sean at Camera West in Palm Springs for $795 and then found a hood online for $50 used. And those hoods are full on metal with a bayonet attachment and deep as hell. Fringer seemed to be coming out with a new Contax to GFX adapter a couple of months ago and the only place to get it from - and I had to wait a couple of weeks - was from the Fringer website itself. The adapter itself works flawlessly, but it does include a rather useless Arca-Swiss foot bolted to the bottom of the adapter which both doesn't rotate and is too narrow to actually clamp in most A/S type clamps. It just wobbles around in my RRS clamps and is barely acceptably tight in my A/S Cube. My next project, well, not the next, but soon, is going to figure out how to design my own rotating clamp with foot to replace that. That Fringer adapter, unfortunately, was $700, about two bills more than the EF to GFX adapter but it certainly works.
Fast forward to last week. Since I already had the Fringer for the Contax, I looked a what other lenses were out there from Contax, and ended up buying a 210mm f/4 Sonnar for around $300. So cheap that it was worth taking a chance on. I've been testing it for the last few days and the results are interesting. The auto focus is very snappy and accurate on the GFX 100s. That's the good news. Well, there's more good news. The lens is very sharp and has a minimum focusing distance of around 5 feet, but it's almost as if there are two lenses in one with this lens. Images up to about 100 feet away are just fabulous and sharp at every aperture until diffraction hits. You start to see mild degradation at f/16 so I would consider that the limit. Here's were it gets weird. At longer distances - say - fifty to a hundred yards - and more toward the frame edges, there was a wide soft blue color fringing that got better as you stopped down and was more or less manageable by f/11 where Capture One's magical chromatic aberration correct could then take care of it. I think I'll be keeping the lens and just using it for those closer subjects where it excels.
I shot basically the same set of test images outside my studio yesterday with the Canon 200mm 2.8 which was very very sharp with zero color fringing and maybe only a slight softening toward the edges wide open but rapidly improved with stopping down. The 200mm .2.8 does have a mild case of corner vignetting wide open which improves with stopping down and also improves with closer subjects. Then I shot my Canon 200mm 1.8 on the same set of images and while it was bitingly sharp in the center, it has a similar but smaller amount of blue fringing near the edges at the longer distances, which also improved with stopping down, plus a very mild dose of corner vignetting wide open which disappeared as you focused closer, and at those closer distances there was zero evidence of any fringing even wide open. Then I finally shot the same images with the Fuji 100-200mm zoom at the 200mm end of the zoom range and surprising, or not, found it to be similar in performance to the Contax at the furthest distances - softer on the edges with a lot of blueish color fringing that improved with stopping down but never really went away. And of course, that lens starts of at f/5.6 so you'd hope that the mild maximum aperture would have let them design in even better performance but I guess that's why that lens is only, what, $2200 or so.
Maybe there are other options out there like the Mamiya or the Pentax in the 200mm range but I'd have to buy another adapter or two and the lenses themselves to test and still no guarantee that they'd be any better that what I've currently got.
Weirdly, it seems that the best all round 200mm lens I have for the GFX is the Canon 200mm 2.8, despite its mild vignetting, which seems to be quite correctable in Photoshop. The vignetting control in C1 does not come close to matching the vignetting profile of the lens but it's a simple fix in Ps if I want to correct it at all.
So now it's time to make a list of where each one of these lenses performs its best and put Post-Its on them all, or at least make a strong mental note.
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Thanks for sharing Peter. Interesting to know about canon.
I've 80mm, 45mm, 35mm, 140mm and 120mm. I did get Pentax set to test but sold it recently. I'm testing Mamiya 50mm SHIFT lens. And it is very sharp from 5.6 to circa f14. And shifts in all direction much like Olymus little shift lens. Do I understand correct that Fringer allows for some metadata like focal length etc?
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