Kowa Prominar 8.5mm f/2.8 Review

Kowa Prominar 8.5mm f/2.8 Handling and Features

The lens may be compact, but it has a satisfying 440g weight that helps to give a quality feel. The generously sized lens hood is, unusually, held in place by a locking screw rather than the usual bayonet fit. This is simple and effective, albeit looking slightly strange with the bright chrome screw jutting out from the rim of the hood. As the hood just pushes into place we do need to align the marks carefully to avoid vignetting. There is ample room to insert filters into the 86mm thread which is part of the hood.

The focusing ring has very sculpted and hard ribbing to ensure a good grip, helping to maintain the vintage look of the lens as a whole. The lens is manual focus only, and as the 8.5mm equates to a 35mm-format 17mm equivalent here we find the one glaring omission that would make life considerably easier. There is no depth of field scale, although there are ample distances marked in feet and meters to make this a useful possibility. As the lens is very difficult to focus by eye, despite any focus assist features in the camera, a DOF scale would be incredibly useful. The focusing and aperture rings move in the direction of Canon cameras, rather than Nikon/Pentax which move in the opposite way.

Focusing is down to 0.2m, just under 8 inches, which represents a maximum magnification of 0.08x, or 1:12.5. This is reasonably close, but not exceptionally so.

Finally, we have the aperture ring, with a design that is very intelligent indeed. The review setting used was f/stops, which are provided with firm, positive click stops at full stop intervals, although one-third stops are quite easy to approximate. Pressing a small button enables the whole ring to be rotated through 180 degrees to bring into play the T stop settings. The T stops, usually used for movie shooting, are clickless. The whole idea is highly inventive and works beautifully.

Lens construction is 17 elements in 14 groups, with 1 Aspherical and 2 XD (Extra Low Dispersion). The aperture comprises 9 circular blades, a feature used to enhance the bokeh of the lens.

There is considerable depth of field in a lens such as this, especially on MFT format, and the one handling issue, as mentioned above, is the lack of a depth of field scale to assist with this. With the G6 focusing is really very difficult and for the closer shots on a tripod, one answer is to use a retractable steel rule to physically measure distances. The success of this does depend on the accuracy of the distance scale on the lens, and this seems to be close enough to work well.

Notwithstanding all this, for more distant shots focus position is moot as with a modest aperture and setting close to infinity most things will be rendered sharply. The ultra wide field of view makes this an exciting lens to use, and there are huge creative possibilities.

Add your message