Adaption

Basically to achieve infinity focus with a mirrorless camera you have to remove a large part of the lens barrel. The barrel extrudes from the optical section so it is a straight forward job, you frankly don’t need a lathe or anything specialised tools to do this. The backside is not visible so I just used a normal metal saw to remove the barrel section that extrudes from the lens. Normally you have to glue the back element back in, but because I used a handheld metal saw the two parts were fused together like glue. With this it is straightforward for the rest of the adaption process, you need a 52.5mm clamp adapter to something larger than 52.5mm. I used a M65 adapter and a M65-M65 helicoid, and the usual step up rings and slim M42 to E-mount adapter.

Lens Characteristics

For being a f/1 it’s not expected to be a sharp lens, but credit where credit is due, this is not the most unsharp lens I have tried. This was meant to be used on a 16mm film projector, so it is not totally fair to complain about sharpness.

The image circle is tiny even compared to most other 16mm film projection lenses, not being able to cover a normal APS-C sensor at infinity. Then again I wouldn’t usually shoot at infinity with a projection lens, so in most cases it will cover an APS-C sensor.

Chromatic aberration is a normal problem for projection lenses, this lens is not the exception. There is a strong blue and purple aberration on high contrast edges and it can be tricky to control this. It is so strong that Lightroom is having a hard time trying to mitigate the effect.

The lens also has trouble controlling the lens flares, even when being in the shade. The bright sky reflecting into the lens can be enough to have a substantial loss in contrast at the bottom half of the image. So mounting a lens hood would be helpful in this regard.