I was looking for this lens for a few years mainly due to me having a Krasnogorsk K3 16mm cine camera that has a M42 mount, and the zoom lens I have for it has some focusing issues. With the 16mm crop factor a 50mm lens looks more like a 150mm. A 20mm would give something close to a 60mm which is close enough to a normal lens that I could use it for my cine projects (which have gone absolutely nowhere the past few years to be honest).
Anyway, I pulled out a Spotmatic SP1000, mounted the lens and shot a roll of HP5 with this to see how it functions and if I want to keep this lens.
Having used a few Soviet era lenses I was surprised by the build quality. Everything feels really well made and smooth. Distinct clicks on the aperture, focus ring moves smoothly, solid build quality.
Focusing with a 20mm lens is a bit tricky, and the SP1000 doesn’t have much “pop” in the focusing screen. I noticed I had quite a few shots with missed focus unless it was at infinity.
What makes this lens really unique though, is how close it can focus.18cm!! 18cm from the lens plane with this lens is like 7cm in front of the glass. With this large of a field of view you can get some really unique compositions and angles that would be impossible with other glass. But it’s quite difficult to find good subjects that suit that kind of photography.
Sharpness when stopped down to f8-f11 is really good in the middle of the image. Sharpness falls off at the edges quite visibly. Look at the lower left edge of this image for example
The multicoating is actually really good, the loss of contrast when having bright lights straight in the lens is not too bad. MUCH better than the 80mm single coated Zeiss lens on my Hasselblad. Look at this image for example, the sun is shining behind the leaf.
The bokeh is quite smooth and I have nothing negative to say about it really. It is not the sharpest lens wide open but it’s not too bad. This was shot at f4.
If you can find this lens for a reasonable price, and you want a very wide angle M42 lens I can recommend it. It’s not an every day carry lens, but it has its place. Pentax has a 20mm f4.5 M42 lens that can be found at around the same price, and the faster K-mount ultra wide lenses are very rare and very expensive. I have the SMC-K 20/4 also on the shelf and eventually I will review it too, but I can tell you right now that it is not that much better. Anyhow, it’s K-mount so a little bit of an apples/oranges comparison..
That’s all this time, let me know if you have any questions. Here’s a couple of sample images.