Initial impressions are very good. Build quality is nice all around (film advance feels a bit flimsy till you get film in the camera, then feels fine).
The automation involved seems smart, not excessive. The top display, for instance, shows focus distance when in AF mode along with aperture and shutter speed. When you've forgotten to advance the film, it shows a little pictograph when you half-press telling you to advance it.
I did have a weird glitch where it didn't read the DX coding on my HP5+, but we'll see if that continues with the next roll.
Here's that viewfinder:
https://i.imgur.com/chUmfOG.jpg
Nice! Film wind on has to feel waaaay better than the Rollei 35AF. That is easily the worst I’ve ever experienced - and I’ve owned Zenit SLRs!
Can you manually set focus between the indicated marks, or does it always set to the closest indicated mark?
FYI you want glitchy DX readout? Let me introduce you to the Leica M7.
Desmolicious wrote:
Nice! Film wind on has to feel waaaay better than the Rollei 35AF. That is easily the worst I’ve ever experienced - and I’ve owned Zenit SLRs!
Can you manually set focus between the indicated marks, or does it always set to the closest indicated mark?
FYI you want glitchy DX readout? Let me introduce you to the Leica M7.
So you can set it to AF or MF.
MF uses the zone settings on the front. AF is hands off, but reads out the actual distance to the subject on the top LCD with 0.1m precision.
Unclear to me whether it's using automated zone focusing or a more precise technique, but it AFs with a half-press, not when you fully press the shutter, so I'm guessing it's pretty precise.
Images seem sharper corner to corner when focused in the midfield. Infinity focused they have a rapid drop-off and vignette in the last 5% of the frame. But it could be that the review shot exclusively at 2.8?
ottokbre wrote:
Images seem sharper corner to corner when focused in the midfield. Infinity focused they have a rapid drop-off and vignette in the last 5% of the frame. But it could be that the review shot exclusively at 2.8?
No movement on my order yet.
The reviewer just mentioned he shot it in Auto mode (where you pick the aperture), but did not mention which apertures were used. That would have been helpful.
Lomo likes its lenses to vignette - that is their intentional signature - but we'll see how it performs at differing apertures. Personally I find the look charming, as I don't want the images to look like they came from any camera.
Interesting that he mentioned the CR2 battery only lasted three rolls. That is very little given it has manual advance and rewind. My p&S cameras that use one CR2 (with auto wind/rewind) last much longer than that, but then again we have no idea if he started with a fully charged battery.
Edit - one of the images shows the full battery charge symbol on the camera. So I'm wondering how accurate that actually is? WIth most of my cameras that use CR2s, it goes from full charge to half charge - where what half charge actually means is replace battery now!
madNbad wrote:
Hopefully he found someone to help him load the film.
That's the only part I watched.
That's where I gave up... But hey he got a camera from Lomo to review and I didn't! Maybe it was because Lomo saw my posting where I pointed out that they wanted to pay a Senior Product Manager who had to travel 50% of the time minimum wage?
Regarding the battery, rechargeables typically hold a lot less charge than disposables. I think the Lomo battery was rated at 300mAh, which is next to nothing.
I did a search for Lomo MC-A on Instagram today and got some pretty recent examples. Much sharper and cleaner. So I am guessing someone else out there is actually stopping down their lenses.
My general rule is if it's middle sharp with nice fall off wide open and then sharp and straight at the focus plane by about 5.6 I'm happy as a clam.
