Saturday, 8 July 2017

Industar-50 3.5/50 Russian Lens, Cheap and sharp!


I got my copy of Industar-50 50mm f3.5 lens from online (Ukraine) for 16 USD.
It's a M39 copy, very small and a sharp lens.
I was mildly surprised by the lens quality in a tiny body. 
It is a pancake lens, in silver (aluminum alloy) body. It looks nice and looks good with my Olympus O-MD- E-M5 Mark II camera, steampunk kind of. 
The colour it produces looks natural without any special casting which many old lenses have like blue, green or yellow casts... 
The lens is M39 mount but with a different registration meant for SLR cameras, I had to use a converter adapter - M39 to M42 and used it with M42 to M43 adapter for my MFT camera. 
It's nice and handy because of its size and I have always been a fan of smaller size cameras and lenses because of being just 5 feet nothing who likes to carry light and small while shooting...

The lens didn't focus to infinity because of the adapter's registration... I've found an ingenious way to make it work. I filed down the adapter to maybe 1mm (trial and testing). Now the lens focuses to infinity! 
Few of my M42 lenses too didn't focus to infinity which I believe will do now...Cannot test them as I am away from home now.
I've rubbed the adapter in rough surface like cement floor and wall....also on the block of stone as shown in the photos below. It took me sometime to file it down to the right registration. It works beautifully now!



 Voila! Infinity focus works now! The photos looks dull because of the constant rain and fog...
Below are sample photos, resized from 16MP to 5MP. No real time comparisons with other similar lenses or technical lens review... Just another share to show that old Russian lenses can be used very much even today. All the photos were taken at f3.5 the widest the lens has to offer.