Olympus Pen E-5, Konica Hexanon AR 50mm f/1.8
I did the Quick Take on the Konica Hexanon AR 40mm f/1.8 a couple of weeks ago, and now it is the turn of the 50mm f/1.8, both of which were fitted to my digital Pen E-P5 with an aftermarket Koncica-M43 mount adapter. As opposed to the AR 40mm f/1.8 which seems to have a cult following, nothing much is written or reviewed of the AR 50mm f/1.8, which was then a standard budget lens for Konica SLR cameras.
So much the better I guess, as these seldom mentioned items normally go for a lower and more affordable price when they are listed or posted on sales or auction sites. Coupled with the Konica-M43 mount adapter, or a mount which will fit your digital body, you will probably end up only spending less than USD 50.00 for the lens/adapter setup. Both are manual focus primes which you might take a while to get used to. One thing you find about both of these lenses was the aperture ring locks the lens into the AE setting just past the f/22 stop, which can be a bit annoying to find the lock and unlock it again.
Images rendered by this 50mm are softer and are less contrasty when compared to the AR 40mm pancake, and when shot at less than wide open, bokeh tend to a have a more pronounced hexagonal shape by virtue of the Hexanon's six-bladed iris. I shoot in RAW, post-process the images on Olympus Viewer 3 (OV3), and have recently begun experimenting with Sharpener Pro from Google Nik Collection for final sharpening. So for commenting on image sharpness, exposure compensation, tonal correction, color balance and the like, which can be adjusted and edited in post-processing, I will leave that to the academics.
Resource Links:
A Guide to Mastering Manual Focus
Why Every Photographer Should Use a Manual Focus Lens
