Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Quantaray 35-80mm Test Photographs

For less than $10, I picked-up this Quantaray NF AF 35-80mm, f4-5.6 multi-coated lens with a Nikon mount.   The lens has a 6-blade aperture and was made in Japan.    

Background: Quantaray is made by Sigma and was distributed exclusively for the Ritz chain of photography stores. I could not find much information on this lens from a basic online search, but I believe it was manufactured in the 1990's. Online user's forums pan the lens as consumer grade quality, yet in general were satisfied with the resulting image quality.

As you can see from the images below, the images show good sharpness. With all manual lens photography, I use 'focus-peaking' on the NX1 to dial-in the best focus. With this particular lens, the focus-dial at the front of the lens body has minimum resistance during rotation and thus feels loose. However in use, I observed that there is sufficient resistance on the focus-dial, so the focus will not drift.

A Fotasy lens mount adapter was used to adapt the Nikon flange mount to the NX1.