85mm F1.9 super takumar

Lowell Goudge · 11-01-2009, 05:55 PM

first impressions with my new old toy which I picked up yesterday.

Went for a walk today in a local river valley, and took the super tak in place of my typical long lens for birds.

Overall, the performance of the lens is very good, and has much different bokeh than my vivitar 85mm F1.4.

The difference really between the two seems to be that the vivitar has no real out of focus detail at all, but things just fade into a blurr of color. The super tak seems to have defineable shapes in the out of focus areas.

I suspect this is due to the aperture blades, which on the super tak, the 6 blade aperture becomes hexagonal almost instantly, where as the 8 blade aperture of the vivitar appears to retain the circular shape while stopped down, to at least aboput F8.

the other noticible difference between the vivitar and the super tak is the focusing. The vivitar has a respectible 120 degree focus throw, but the super tak has a 330 degree focusing throw from min focus to infinity.

While I am sure focusing accuracy with the super tak will be more precise, it is going to take some getting used to. It will definitely be slower to work with if changing focus range.

The metering, like my SMC Tak 35 F2 it requires an offset of about 1 stop (over sxpose) when in AV mode.

I have attached a couple of shots, the first 2 from my walk resized only mainly to show bokeh. the last is a 50% crop out of a k10d image, hand held at 1/25 wide open to show sharpness

Pentaxor · 11-01-2009, 06:22 PM

I believe the Vivitar due to it's wider opening is more capable of isolating your subject, which should be for a lens with a f1.4 opening. what I can only assume is that the Super Tak would be better at slower aperture speed. maybe around f8. the 77mm however peaks at around f4 way better than the vivitar. but of course we are talking about a stop advantage here and exclusive use at that aperture opening. but for overall use, I would get the DA70 instead of the FA77.

Lowell Goudge · 11-01-2009, 06:46 PM

we are really talking about apples and oranges between the Super Tak and the vivitar.

Not just the additional stop (almost) but also in the lens design.

The super tak is a classical lens design where the entire lens group is moved to focus.

The Vivitar focuses by moving the rear group, and not the front element at all.

I fully intend to compare the two in more detail, but first impression is that at about F2-2.2 both are about equal in sharpness, but quite different in bokeh.