Cimako 135mm F2.8 - Oldie and Goldie?

One exciting part of shooting video with the new DSLRs is the resurgence of old manual focus lenses, and the beautiful and creative image quality they have to offer. Personally I enjoy picking up these almost forgotten relics and testing them out as every lens offers a different tone and quality and can potentially expand one's creative palette. Not long ago I picked up what was for me a question mark of a lens, the Cimako 135mm F2.8, for 8 euros, and yesterday I found the time to do some tests. There is practically no info on the Cimako on the net, and as I found out the reason is that this lens was mostly sold through distributor brands in the late 70's. As it turns out, this lens is very available today under differing brand names and sometimes to very affordable prices, so I was excited to find out how it performed.

                                    

The Cimako 135mm F2.8 was produced by the Japanese company Cima Kogaku, and from what I have been able to search out this lens would be the same as the ones Cima Kogaku produced for Topcon for the launching of the Topcon RE200 in 1977 and branded as RE Topcor N lenses. These lenses were also sold under different brand names such as Exaktar, Carenar, Quantary etc..

Eventhough these are readily available over ebay there is not much info on their performance on the net, so I hope these test-images below will be of help to some. The testing conditions today where horrible with rapidly moving clouds making the task of shooting several similar shots of a brick wall in succession daunting, so this is nothing like a scientific test - just to give an impression of performance.

Below are crops from image center at f2.8, f5.6, f8 and f22, no sharpening or enhancing applied (only the naturally occuring contrast difference supplied from existing light conditions ;-). Click on the images for 100% view of the crops.


 F2.8           F5.6           F.8            F22

As you can see the image sharpness increases drastically from F2.8 to F5.6, and then to my eye at least a little sharper again at F8 and more or less retaining the sharpness throughout to F22. Of course the difference in contrast from the light confuses a little, but the differences from F2.8 to F5.6 are pronounced. Below are crops from the bottom left corner of the image.


 F2.8           F5.6           F.8            F22

The performance is similar as above, only adding that there is some extra fuzziness to the corner crops. I am shooting off a Canon EOS Rebel T2i/550d with an APS-C size sensor with an enlargement factor of 1.6, which means I would be using the sweetest area of the lens while shooting and edge distortions should be less pronounced, so I was a little disappointed by the soft edge blur.

Here are links to the full frame images of the wall plus a shot with more depth in it at F8.



All in all I would say the lens is a bargain at the price it usually goes for. It is a fast 135mm, quite sharp once it is stopped down a little bit and has nice, warm color rendition with a nice bokeh. With the quality I got for the price I paid, I consider it a bargain.

Another shot done with this lens (at F22 with ND8 filter):

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