Marco Aries

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 ...

 Many vintage lenses are known to be small, compact and fairly lightweight, but this one is not. More than 19 centimeters long with the sun hood collapsed and 700 grams of weight it's kind of a beast.  I bought this lens along with the Konica Autoreflex TC and the Konica Hexanon 40mm f1.8, and my first question was: “how the heck did they do this? How the heck did they use such long, heavy lens on an analog film camera?”  I mean, even with the in-body stabilization of my Sony a6500 I had a really hard time using this lens, getting stable footage and avoiding shaky pictures, especially at 300 millimeters, partially obviously because of the focal length, but also because this lens is fricking heavy and makes the system really front heavy. Plus the adapter can't really hold that much weight so it flexes a little bit. Yeah, that was kind of weird, I seriously feared for my camera while using this lens, so much so that I always hold the system by the lens and not by the ca...

  The Sony 18-105 constant f4 is an optically stabilized lens from the G series for E mount cameras, specifically for the APS-C sensors cameras such as the a5100 and the 6000 series.  Theoretically this is a great all-around lens, going from wide to telephoto while keeping that f/4 aperture constant. Plus, the barrel does not extend when zooming and that makes for a great lens to be used on electronic gimbals and other stabilizers.  It is also fairly compact and lightweight, even if it has power zoom built-in and optical stabilization, being 11.5cm long with a 72mm front element and 427 grams of weight.  Zoom and focus are electronic, so they don’t have hard stops, and the motors are extremely quiet.  I bought this lens at the beginning of 2018 and before reviewing it I used it in many different situations: I used it both for taking pictures and videos, as I always do, I took portraits, shot concerts, brought it with me to the other side of the world and...