One of the realities with modern digital SLR cameras is the focal length multiplier will effectively turn a 28mm wide angle lens into the equivalent of a 45mm lens on a standard film SLR. Canon and Nikon have addressed this issue on their newer DSLRs with special “digital only” lenses that are much wider, but will only work on cameras designed for these lenses.
For my D30 these lenses are not an option. If I want to go wide, my only choice is to start looking at ultrawide 35mm lenses, which become merely wide-angle lenses after the crop factor is taken into account. Unfortunately, most ultra-wide angle lenses are quite expensive — typically in the thousand dollar range for Canon glass. Given that I don’t do a lot of wide angle photography, I decided to see if there are other options available.
After browsing the DPReview forums, I ran across the MC Zenitar 16mm/2.8, an interesting fisheye lens from Minsk in Belarus, formerly in the USSR. Fisheye lenses are known for the warped images they produce, but on the Zenitar the fisheye effect is relatively minimal, and the DSLR crop factor actually helps reduce it further when the image is cropped.
Reviews I found were positive, and at around $110US on eBay it seemed like a safe thing to try. The shipping was direct from Belarus, and when it arrived, the packaging was half the fun.
Brown paper and twine, Cyrillic lettering, so lo-tech and so Russian. Shipping to Canada was about twice as long as they estimated.
It’s a hefty piece of machinery, very compact and very dense. It feels like the solid chunk of metal and glass that it is.
The lens is fully manual, but given that it hits infinity at around
1.2m, focussing isn’t much of an issue. Exposure can be set manually or semi-automatically by setting the camera to Av mode, picking an aperture on the lens and letting the camera figure out the shutter speed.
Mine came with the EOS mount, and it fits the camera well.
Unfortunately, the built in lens “hood” (more like a lip than a hood) was poorly aligned, and was rotated about 10 degrees off the vertical. This was my first sign that perhaps quality was not job #1 at Zenitar.
After eagerly hooking it up, I went for a quick stroll through the
neighbourhood, firing off a bunch of shots. Unfortunately, the initial results were disappointing—the pictures were extremely soft. If I stopped the lens down to f/16, the pictures were passable, but this required a tripod, hampering usability. I’ve taken a few shots on the lens with the tripod, but it’s definitely not in regular circulation on my camera.
Recently, while reviewing my zenitar links I ran across Eric Tischer’s review of the lens, in which he discusses similar soft focus problems and how he adjusted the lens. Given my experience thus far, I didn’t think there was much harm in giving it a try.
I tried removing the lens hood first, which is held in place by three impossibly tiny screws. Unfortunately, on two of the three screws, the screwdriver sheared the screw head off completely, making it impossible to remove the screw unless I was willing to drill them out.
As the metal shavings piled up, my anxiety rose. It wasn’t an expensive lens, but I certainly don’t like to destroy things. So I decided to ignore the mostly cosmetic lens hood misalignment, and move on to improving the main problem, the focus. After removing the rubber focus grip, I was relieved to see much larger screws holding the focus ring in place. I loosened these and started making adjustments.
According to Eric, the main problem with the lens is that when focussed at infinity, the lens elements are not extended to their furthest amount which results in an out of focus image. After some testing, I realized that my lens was actually focussing too far when set to infinity. I backed it off and found the point which looked the best through the lens, and some quick tests confirmed that the focus was indeed better than before.
I put the lens back together, and took some practice shots. The focus is definitely improved from where it was before. It’s not going to win any awards, but I can now take acceptably sharp pictures hand-held.
Now that the focus is tweaked, I’m having fun with this lens and I’ll definitely use it more in the future. It’s a bit frustrating, however, that these kinds of adjustments are required in the first place. Clearly, the quality control on final assembly is lacking—my guess is that the lens components were built several years back, and only now are being assembled and shipped by staff that clearly does not know how to properly assemble and test these lenses.
Bottom line is that the manual Zenitar lens works well on Canon bodies in both full manual mode and automatic exposure modes. If you’re looking for an affordable wide-angle solution, and don’t mind possibly having to partially disassemble, tweak, and re-assemble a lens it’s worth checking out.
View my images tagged with zenitar on Flickr.