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Porst Color Reflex MC Auto 55mm 1:1.2 (most likely made by Tomioka)
A manual focus, ultrafast normal lens from the manual-focus era, very well made and compact with 55mm filter-thread. It was surely made for several major mounts of that time, but mine is for Pentax and so is perfectly adaptable to Canon EF (EOS) today with the cheapest possible adapters, but sits a bit turned to the left in order to make room between the mirror and the aperture lever, which I took off completely.
Looking forward to a Noctilux? Or calculating how to buy a Canon 50/1.2 L? Stop saving money, selling your car or wife or thinking about a second career in drug-making: Just buy this one! This thing is optically extraordinary and despite the fact that the focus-ring is sticky in my sample, well made, too.
Porst was a big photo-store-chain for quite a long time in Germany and they also sold cameras (mostly imported from the former GDR, e.g. rebranded Exacta) and lenses under their own brand. Their cameras often used the Pentax-mount and so does my lens. Sadly, it's not as easy as with Vivitar to find out, who originally made a Porst-item. While you can read it out of the serial with Vivitar, you have to compare Porst items and decide for yourselfs. After extensive search on the internet I'm relatively sure, that this 55/1.2 was originally made by Tomioka in Japan, who did not make many end-customer lenses and only very very few of these reached the German market under the Tomioka-brand. But there are few and this seems to be the same lens. My second bet would be Komine, because they seem to use the same fonts for the engravings, while the ones on my Komine 24/2 have different spacings. But, while I always want to know such things, just to ... well ... know it, in reality it's completely irrelevant. This lens is great, that's all that counts.
This lens is sharp and relatively contrasty even wide-open. If you have ever used a Canon 50/1.2 or a Noctilux, you can only call this lens a gem.
Manual focussing is not easy at f/1.2. I use an adapter with focus confirmation (the green spot and the focus-points light up in the finder when focussed right), but the only really reliable method is focussing via live-view. But on the other hand: Nothing ever really is in focus at f/1.2.
Do you need this lens when you already have the 50/1.4 USM? No, of course not. Half a stop is nothing. But it's still cool ;-)
COMPATIBILITY
As mentioned above, it depends on the mount it was originally sold in. Olympus OM, Pentax, Nikon and Contax/Yashica are easiyl adaptable to EOS. Of course, Nikon- and Pentax-versions work well on Nikon and Pentax - bodies, as do Minolta-versions on Sony. For other adaption-options, please search the internet - it depends on the flange focal distance: If the distance between the sensor/film was higher than it has to be for your actual body, adaption is trivial.
If you are planning to adapt a mount-version that originally would not work: These third-party-lenses' focus-planes are adjustable, so the manufacturers didn't have to build different optical versions for different mounts.
PRICE
This lens is quite hard to finde, so prices vary wildly. Mint samples reach € 200,- and more and prices are rising. But you can still be lucky and get one for around € 100,- if you are willing to search for a while... and remember: With low supply of only one lens now or then, there only has to be one serious other bidder to raise the price to astronomic heights...
ACCESSORIES
I don't really know. I think it was originally shipped with a quiver, but I don't own anything else but the lens itself. I would never use it with a shade, because it is so nice and tiny, that I wouldn't destroy this advantage with a shade.
It uses cheap 55mm filters, which were quite common at that time and aren't any more today - which is great, because this makes them quite cheap today and you can always use a 55-58mm step-up-ring. And while the front moves when focussing, the filter - thread doesn't rotate, making the use of grads and polarizers easy.
GREAT.
MECHANICS
Made in Japan.
Metal everywhere, the only thing not made from metaol is the rubber on the focus-ring.
Not the slightest hint of play or wobbling in any part, nothing has only a tenth of a millimeter play.
The markings are engraved in the metal and filled with paint.
The focus-ring is strongly dampened and the aperture-ring has distinct half-stop-clicks.
This is not any worse than the very best Leica- or Zeiss-lenses of that time.
GREAT.
The Kiron is only very slightly worse made, by the way.
ERGONOMICS
Again, this lens is great. This is a very small lens for it's maximum aperture and while still relatively light, too, you still feel all the metal and have enough weight to believe, that this will last forever. If you hold a Canon 50/1.2L in the other hand, it seems like a brick. Size DOES matter, also see Lenses: What's important?
The focus-ring, which is located on the front of the lens, sits perfectly there, enabling you to support the lens-camera-combination on the lens and still turn the focus-ring.
The dampened focus-ring must be extraordinary, but mine is sticky and "jumps" where it's more loose than in other positions. The aperture-ring feels great, everything feels hard enough to feel the quality and easy enough to be turned with a finger. The focus-path is already quite spread on the wider distances, about two centimeters between infinity and 3m and progressively spreads towards the near end, with three centimeters between 0.5m and 0.6m. This is great, because depth-of-field is extremely narrow at f/1.2.
The lens extends a tiny bit, a few millimeters, when focussed, but the filter-thread doesn't rotate, so that grads and polarizers are easily usable.
There is a focus-scale without infrared-focus-indices but with a complete depth-of-field-scale.
OPTICS
Optics of this Porst are extraordinary, even wide open.
The minimum focus distance is 0.5m, which is hardly close enough for a normal lens, but not great.
Distortion is never visible.
Vignetting is really strong wide-open, maybe up to 3 stops darker in the corners. This is even visible on APS-C. The good thing is, that this vignetting is still fully correctable, you don't loose detail due to it.
The aperture is made of 8 straight blades, giving you very smooth out-of-focus highlights with boring 8-ray-light-stars. Higher-end, but I prefer 7 or 9 blades for magnificent light-stars.
I have no information on this lens' usability for for infrared-photography, sorry.
It's color reproduction matches my other lenses.
Lateral CAs (purple/green fringes along high-contrast edges), when not corrected by newer EOS cameras (or nearly all Nikons), are well controlled in this lens. It's surely well below one pixel wide at max.
What you do have here are LoCAs around out of focus high-contrast edges, green or pink, depending on if they are in front or behind the focus plane:
Sharpness is one of the most overrated qualities of lenses. That being said, this lens is extraordinary, especially, but not only, in comparison to it's modern competitors, even if it shares the relatively low contrast wide open. Look at the LoCA-sample above for the contrast.
@ f/1.2 (wide-open!) 100% crop from extreme top-left corner from 22MP JPG (5D Mark II).
I won't bore you with more samples, if this is the extreme corner wide open.
My sample of this lens is centered well, with no significant difference recognizable between the four corners at any setting...
The focus-field is more or less flat.
Flare is surprisingly well controlled for it's age. While I think, that a lens less prone to flare and especially ghosting is not always better, as at least ghosts can be a very nice tool to show the lighting conditions in your pictures, this 55mm flares slightly and produces some yellow-red ghosts with a bright source of light in or just outside the frame.
I was just looking for a cheaper alternative to the modern ultrafast 50mm - primes like the 50/1.2L, when I decided to try this lens. The half stop vs. the 50/1.4 of course is nonesense both in regard to depth-of-field, as well as regarding light-gathering. It's just fun or for very special purposes, I never seem to encounter, but I'm no pro.
If you are like me and just have fun with a photographic tool that gives you results nothing else does, but can't or don't want to spend a fortune for the original solution, this Porst is a very good alternative.
Alternatives
Well... when considering price: None. Of course there are the Noctilux, the actual 50/1.2L, the old 50/1.0L and so on, but all these are A LOT more expensive. A serious and real alternative for all normal people is the 50/1.4 USM, which is a great lens and only half a stop slower, which you probably won't ever notice, if noone'd told you. And even the 50/1.8, as the cheapest of all, is a very good choice: Optically excellent and only about one stop slower than this thing, which gives about the same results, either.
You buy and own this lens only to have it. There's no serious reason to buy it.
Und Samsung ist ja doch eher ne recht coole Marke, da lohnt es sich ja zumindest mal zu fragen…
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