What's a Magnicon?! Time for another cheap lens test!

For those following my Instagram there was a teaser picture of an upcoming review of an extremely awesome Tamron Adaptall II 35-70mm CF Macro a while back. I love the lens and have gotten some great shots with it, macro and other. But the downside of buying a 33 year old lens? It’s bound to develop a quirk or two. Unfortunately my Tamron has developed focus creep. At either end of its focusing range macro included, the lens is a gem. Any other point in its range? Look at it wrong (ha pun) and its out of focus. There are possible fixes for this so hopefully in the near future it will be back in action.

Great visually and buttery smooth action. Uncontrollable focus creep has got the Tamron out of any usable action for the time being. But what can take its place for macro duty while being even cheaper than its $40 +/- price? “Ebay time!”

Warily, I logged back on to ebay to begin the search again. After loosing a bid at the last minute for an original SMC Pentax FA-50 2.8 macro. I wanted the lens a little to much, even going as high as $90, it ultimately sold for $96. I would have loved the lens I’m sure, but it was way beyond a simple budget replacement for a budget lens. Time to look again with a little more brain and a little less heart. I hopped on ebay again (I love amazon but it isn’t the best for good older lenses) and opened up the lens section of the Pentax forums to double check what I was finding. More Tamrons, early Sigmas, tons of no name odd balls and great lenses with question areas too big to risk putting money down. In my search I came across several different types of lenses from the brand Magnicon. What was it? Who’s was it? The forums had a few reviews on various types and all were good. A quick google, lead to the info that Magnicon was the “store brand” for a now defunct except in name Canadian camera store chain called Blacks (think Ritz Camera here in the US I’m assuming) the lenses being produced by Vivitar or Tokina. Quality ranging from great to good depending on the model and who did the manufacturing, it was a risk but finding a supposedly excellent Magnicon “macro” lens at a great price, it was a risk I felt was worth it.

At $20, with overall good reviews of every Magnicon lens I could find info on I felt it was ok to take the risk on one of the companies lenses I couldn’t really find any info on. Worth it? Very much so!

A few days later and this Magnicon was in my hands. I was actually decently impressed at first looks. Full metal construction, comfortably weighty, soft but not “free” movement on the slide style focal length adjustment, pretty unused looking overall and..why won’t it fit on my camera? !@#$ It even says PK on the lens!

Now would be a good time to mention when buying film era third party “K” mount lenses. There might be cutting at times.

It turns out that some manual era third party lenses have a larger diaphragm lever flange than it really needs to be. No problem with a deeper bodied SLR but with a DSLR is becomes an issue and the lens will not sit flush on the body like it should. What do you do? Easy cut the excess off! Now I’m not crazy (well with this). This “trap” as it’s known is easy to find out about and so is the fix. I suggest Mark Roberts (https://www.robertstech.com) wonderful site that has a great write up on the issue as well as lens info and great blogs and photo sets. The short of it- a couple of screws, a quick dremel, and a quick cleanup and voila! From wrong to right!

Lens modification done a quick hold your breath test fit and it’s fit and worked perfect ever since! Now I can’t speak from experience on if older third party lenses can have issues on newer Nikons and Canons but I imagine since both companies have changed mounts several times since even the early 90’s adapters have fixed every like issue if there has been any.

After the fun of modifying the lens, the fit ends up perfect.

Once on camera the Magnicon has simple controls-pull in and out for focal length, twist for focus, a very nice clickable aperture ring with a push in lock button for auto aperture mode that at least in my case works on modern cameras. At first I was concerned with movement that happens holding the lens vertically as it will “slide” under its own weight but this turned out to be nothing once mounted no matter the shooting angle, as hopefully your not holding your camera by the lens. The rubber knurling is great and the focus action is smooth and responsive. The biggest negative being how close the aperture ring is to the camera body. While the movement and feel is actually embarrassingly satisfying, if you feel you will need to adjust aperture quickly or often, switch it to auto mode so you can control it from camera.

Alright, now with all the boring stuff out of the way how does the lens actually do?

In short the lens shoots amazing! Nice, crisp and and sharp. The sweet spot does seem to be in the f/5 range, with sharpness dropping off a bit at narrower apertures. Macro on a lens that can be had so inexpensively is by far this lens’s greatest selling point and also its biggest sales gimmick. While not bad in the least it should defiantly be labeled as “close to macro” or “macroish” with a whopping 1:5 magnification and the closest focusing distance being about 0.31m from subject. Compare that to the Tamron (also not rreeaallyy a true macro lens) 1:3.5 and 0.25m.

Aperture range is f/3.5-22 with f/3.5 being available in the entire 35-70 range. The lens is also threaded for 49mm filters.

The pictures below were taken on a quick mid morning hike. As you can see color is great, crisp and sharp. Bokeh is pleasing if not a bit muddy and a weird laser pointer type flare can happen if when sunlight hits the lens just right (Third photo). As you can see on the second photo, when seriously pixel peeking the focus is tack sharp. An extension tube is being purchased so an update may be coming soon!

Closest “Macro” you can get on the Magnicon 35-70mm Macroish. However with how sharp the lens is, I am tempted to try it with a quality extension tube.

No, this isn’t how macro the Magnicon is. What it is, is surprisingly tack sharp as superzooming on this picture of a wild flower shows.

When hit with angled light just right a strange laser point type flare will show itself (left of center in image). I have recreated this result several times. A few from this exact composition with different settings. Only with extremely bright as in midday sun light. It could be an imperfection in my lens only.

In closing the Magnicon 35-70mm Macro shows that a lens doesn’t have to be expensive or “big brand” to be quality. It’s far from being top tier at any one thing, but it’s also not bad at any one thing. It’s just a good solid, pretty all purpose lens that shows that compared to many of today’s budget friendly options 20+ years ago even cost conscious companies still tried to put out quality products. Magnicon lenses can be found for any of the late 80’s-mid 90’s popular mounts- Nikon, Canon, Minolta and of course Pentax so defiantly pick one up cheap and have fun!

Next up will be a quick jump to something a little different, thanks for reading and stay tuned!

Hows a super cheap 500mm lens from the 80's do hooked up to a modern rig?!

Ah, the 80’s. Top Gun, Robert Palmer, Magnum P.I. ,Members only you get the picture.

I’m not going to get into the who’s and whats of these lenses, honestly I don’t know it. What I do know is that they where extremely popular in the ‘80s and early 90’s as film SLR cameras became more popular and more affordable (Canon AE1 anyone?) and are still being made today under a slew of names. Heavy hitters of the industry like Quantaray, Bower, Vivitar, Deco Photo, Rokinon, Phoenix (sarcasm much?) and countless others that you’ll find out the brand when you open the package.

All the same look, design and specs. 500mm 1.8f. Manual focus, with a tripod mount, snazzy! But how are they really? Luckily my dad. A proud Canon AE-1 owner since the mid 80’s happened to have one of the originals of lens type sitting in his gun case, sort of ironic place to put it as we’ll find out.

The Kimunor 500mm f1.8 one of the originals of these extension tube loving class of lenses is surprisingly well built. With full metal externals, smooth action and decent weight.

I decided to give this hand-me-down, a try out on my Pentax K-70, a quick search on the web told me that this lens uses a T-mount (to replace the Canon FD mount my dad had on it). A day later problem one: While yes all these lenses say the use a T-mount they are often sold with an “x”-mount adapter. It is NOT in fact a proper T-mount, its some sort of un-named modified T-mount. Game over? An AHA! Moment later a Canon FD to Pentax K mount adapter was just a Prime delivery away.

The FD to PK adapter above. Seems to be of a good quality , reviews don’t mention problems, and it does work but I do wonder if its own glass is part of the weirdness showing up in shots of the Kimunor. Testing with a OEM FD mount lens will have to happen (Back to raid dads)

While I’m not a fan of the connection…The lens mount and outer ring twist tighten (on the Canon side) compared to the more normal bayonet mounts we are all used to…It is a light tight connection and after a few snap shots it became clear it worked the next morning off it was time for a test run!

On stationary objects the Kimunor comes out strong and appears sharp. But pixel peaking shows a tendency to meld colors. This becomes more apparent with out pixel peaking in the background, where blurring, color bleed, ghosting- best way to put it a 3D without the glasses effect is noticeable to the naked eye

Once again the image looks good overall with weird effects seeming to happen on the out of focus and background areas of the image, but by all means is look able and the weird effects mentioned while possibly distracting full screen or in large print would be in many cases unnoticeable on Instagram and other like sized images.

As seen a mentioned in the above captions the lens does seem to throw colors on non subject objects in weird ways. I am not 100% sure if this is caused by the lens itself (no finger prints!) or if it is the adapter. Either way its not the worst quality in the world, I might go so far to say that in this world of extreme 4k sharpness , in the right situations this fault or design flaw might add to a photo.

Upon opening the lens up (it unscrews in the middle) you are welcomed to the surprisingly only bit of plastic in the construction of the lens. The housing for the back element.

Glass weirdness aside the biggest flaw to the lens is how it focuses. The barrel twist style zoom is slow, awkward and nearly impossible to get fine focus on, and while there is an aperture control (that seems to do very little) there is no fine focus ring, just the main twist the whole barrel. The whole thing made trying to shoot anything remotely living a trial of zoom to about right then step forwards/backwards accordingly. To then find out later that what looked sharp in both viewfinder and screen was actually less than so. Stationary objects and a tripod make thing more precise as always and possibly using it on a model that can stay still while the focus work takes place will be a better test instead of wildlife…even though isn’t that what a telephoto is supposed to be good at?

Looks sharp? Don’t worry its not. Seems to be the theme of shooting with the Kimunor 500mm

And try to adjust focus on the fly with the funky twist barrel focus! At least the splash is crisp.

If you have ever shot a rifle before, you will notice a similarity before long. No your not crazy and really it makes since whichever company actually designed this lens (no matter what brand they are sold as) was thinking..It’s a spotting scope re purposed for the camera market!!

For those not familiar with hunting or shooting, rifle scopes don’t need to have camera quality glass or focusing systems, they need to zoom and give enough of a quality image for you to be able to tell what and where your aiming at. Company “A” makes cheaper hunting scope/binocular glass or even entire scopes, and comes up with the bright idea to double down and turn the same basic workings and set up into a camera lens. True? Sure makes since to me and here we are 30+ years later still able to buy the same 500mm f1.8 lenses from Amazon to Ebay!

So is it actually good at anything? Yeah actually……

It does pull of a pretty nice moonshot (tripod of course)

It also doesn’t do to bad of a portrait!

So if while I won’t suggest buying one at full price ($70-$100+ on Amazon) if you run across any of the 500mm f.8 lenses at a thrift store or garage sale for I’d say less than $30 it might be worth it to have.. Couple of notes..There are really countless names these things are sold under and at least black and white. If it looks like mine its the same lens! Looking at pictures of new ones for sale it looks like more plastic might be involved so it is possible quality has dropped. Because first impressions aside these early models are actually pretty well built, if very very basic. They were and are sold in a variety of mounts (even Current Sony!) The Kimunor came with 3 adapters a Canon FD, Pentax K and Olympus however good luck finding the adapters themselves to me it was easier to just buy an adapter..the fact my dad has a few FD lenses around didn’t hurt.