Pentax 67 120mm F3.5 Soft has an 8-blade aperture with a circular opening up to F6.7 and becomes visibly octagon-shaped at F8 and further down the aperture range.ġ. The lens they released feels like a standard one and there is no feeling that the focal length is too long.
Overall, there is a feeling that Asahi tried to release one but universal lens instead of two soft lenses. This is why the 120mm lens is very consistent with this idea. I wrote in my previous posts that due to my approach to taking portraits, 135mm F4 Macro and 150mm F2.8 lenses appear to better fit my purposes than 165mm F2.8 and 200mm F4. In my view, this focal length proves to also be very convenient for shooting portraits. And it is very convenient because this way it can replace two lenses at once and can be kept on camera all the time. However, a lens with the 120mm focal length for the 6×7 format is closer to the standard 105mm F2.4 than to 150mm F2.8 and 165mm F2.8 typically used for portraits. “Standard” or “portrait” lens?Īs a rule, soft lenses are considered “portrait” lenses and are done with respective focal lengths. I even emailed Ricoh, the current owner of Asahi Optical Co., but they replied that it is literally “hard to determine it now”.
Unfortunately, it was not possible to find an exact optical formula of this lens. Unlike Convex, Pentax 67 120mm F3.5 Soft is a lens in which some first-order aberrations, like coma and chromatic aberrations, are fixed, but the spherical aberration, which makes the image soft, still remains. The simplest soft lens is a single-element lens like Convex containing all kinds of aberrations.
In fact, I wanted to buy an old Takumar 6X7 150mm F2.8 but the seller sent me a Pentax 67 120mm F3.5 Soft by mistake, which I decided to keep and test.