Marco Aries

A couple of years ago I showed you the MTO 500mm and since then I’ve been even more curious to try a 1000mm, but let me tell you: they are two different beasts. The 500 is reasonably small, light and easy to use, while the Rubinar is big, heavy and hard to handle. The lens is made of metal, it weighs around 1kg 650g, it is 18 to 19,5cm long and it has an external diameter of 13cm, with a 11,5cm front thread. It has a fixed aperture of f10 and no iris. The focusing ring is rubberized, it turns 300 degrees and the minimum focusing distance is 4 meters. It comes with a large sun hood and it has a rotating collar with a tripod mount and soft clicks every 90 degrees. The M42 mount has a flange distance of 45,46mm. While it does lack some sharpness, it still manages to capture a good amount of finer details, plus, catadioptric lenses do not have chromatic aberration. Colors are natural with good contrast but lacking some saturation. Specular highlights have the very distinctive torus shape a...

Soviet zooms are very rare and only few of them were produced; the Granit 11 we are looking at today, is one of them. Manufactured from 1978 in the KMZ and Arsenal plants, it went through at least a couple different iterations, until the 90s when it was renamed MC zoom Arsat. Older models don’t have a letter after the number 11, but after a while it was added to indicate the mount. The letter M stands for M42, just like the Jupiter 21.   This lens is made out of metal with rubberized focus and zoom rings, it weights 780g, it is 157mm long when focused to infinity and 175mm when fully extended, with a 58mm front thread. The iris has 6 blades, the aperture is clicked and it goes from f4.5 to f22 with half steps. The zoom ring turns 90 degrees and zooming happens internally. The focusing ring is textured, it turns 300 degrees and minimum focusing distance is 1.5m. When focusing the front element turns as well. Flange distance for the  m42 mount  is 45,46mm   Sharpness ...