Here is a quick test I conducted in Berlin today… No bloody charts, just a pair of AKG headphones. The idea was to focus on the AKG badge, determine sharpness and judge the overall character of the lenses. The apertures are at a minimum for each lens – maybe you can go a bit lower on the Proskar but the Canon FD 50mm Macro is a good fit for it, seems sharpest with that lens.
The anamorphic lenses (and back lenses) are:
- Lomo OCT18 F2.5 35mm (Original rear lens)
- Isco Centavision (Canon FD 50mm F1.4)
- Proskar (Canon FD 50mm F3.5 Macro)
- Panasonic LA7200 (Olympus 9-18mm)
I stopped each down to minimum apertures which were rear camera lens dependant.
- Lomo – F2.5
- Isco – F1.4
- Proskar – F3.5
- LA7200 – F4.5
Shot in 1080/25p on a hacked GH1, transcoded using 5DtoRGB (Alpha). Here are the wideness factor of the lenses:
- Lomo 2x wider at 35mm FOV
- Isco 2x wider at 50mm FOV
- Proskar 2x wider at 50mm FOV
- LA7200 1.33x wider at 18mm FOV
This gives us a general idea of the characters of the lens.
LOMO is quite soft and cannot be used at F1.4 like the Isco Centavision. But it makes up for this in terms of character. Quite low contrast but in a nice way. It feels retro and feels most natural, like film.
ISCO (Centavision) is sharpest, best resolving especially with use of diopters which easily screw onto the front of the 82mm thread. My Centavision seems different to most others, it is more like an Iscorama 54 but due to being multicoated, it flares less. When it can be made to flare up, it looks fantastic.
PROSKAR is very sharp on the Canon FD 50mm F3.5 Macro especially at infinity but trickier to focus since like the LOMO it requires the back lens to rack focus as well as the front anamorphic adapter. This is a fantastic lens for the money and I’ll be investigating it’s capabilities more in the coming weeks.
LA7200 is not suited to these kinds of shots, it works better stopped down and with rolling vistas, super wide shots. It’s quite a sharp lens at F4 and above (terrible below that) but doesn’t show it as well here since it’s being used at 18mm whilst the rest are on 35mm or 50mm so the AKG badge is further away. I couldn’t get the LA7200 much closer than it was due to it being difficult to fit diopters to the front of it to bring down minimum focus distance.
