Minolta AF 100-300mm F4.5-5.6 APO A-mount lens review by jwasturias
 jwasturias#29630 date: Jul-17-2016 | |
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| sharpness: 4 color: 5 build: 3 distortion: 4 flare control: 4 overall: 4 | tested on:
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| ownership: | I own this lens |
| compared to: | Tokina 100-300 f5 m42 (CA is horrible) Tamron 70-300 KAF LD (CA and sharpness at long end unusable). TAIR Photosniper 300 f4.5 MC. (Actually at f5.6 better than any other lens I tried) CA no problem at F5.6 and bokeh very nice. Pentax SMC 135 f3.5 (nice compact, but more CA than the APO). Sharpness at f8 about the same. Minolta 28-135 f4-f4.5. Lovely lens, but half a stop light transmission lost into a black hole. Same f stop has 1.5x faster shutter speed on the APO or any other lens. Beercan 70-210 f4. love the built. Similar to 28-135.Sold it :( Beercan 100-200 f4.5 (Sold it:(, but I am going to buy this one back. Works better at open aperture than classic beer can and the APO, and less CA than classic beercan). |
| price paid: | 120 |
| positive: | CA control in high contrast situations. It is not perfect, but miles ahead of my beercans (70-210, 100-200, 28-135) and various primes (pentax smc 135 f3.5, canon fd 85 f1.2L and some native E-mount lenses (when lens correction for CA is switched off!) Important: this lens really needs to be stopped down at least half a stop! At 300mm use f6.3 and the result improve a lot. Weight and size. So minuscule, there is no excuse not to have this lens with you. |
| negative: | Needs to stop down at least 0.5 a stop for real improvement. Auto-focus quite slow. (Compared to for instance the Minolta 28-135 which only has to move the rear element). |
| comment: | It is amazing how much stopping down half a stop (from f5.6 to f6.3) makes a difference! Centre sharpness is almost maximum and corners are really lifted. The beercan 100-200 is probably the best for open aperture picture taking (f4.5) better than the APO or the classic beercan 70-210. But at f6.3, the APO beats them all in my opinion. And the high contrast CA control is miles better. However, I prefer the built and feel of the beer cans and want to purchase the 100-200 again. (Only cost 70 euros secondhand). I love the 28-135 and use both with the LA-EA4 adopter for when I need fast auto-focus. (Plenty of manual focus jewels in my collection). NOTE: This lens has a back-focus issue on my camera (like the other Minolta lenses I have !) I need to dial in -3 micro AF adjustment on the LA-EA4 adapter. Initially the pictures wide open looked a bit soft until I started comparing manual focus and autofocus pictures on some small font writing. I adjusted the correction until the result of Manual focus and autofocus were about the same. Still, I recommend stopping down at least half a stop if you are going to pixel peep :) Compared to Minolta 28-135 at f6.3, the results are very similar between 100-135). Obviously the "secret handshake" can go down to f4.5 (which is actually f5 in terms of light transmission), Both lenses can do with stopping down half a stop. |
rating summary
- total reviews: 69
- sharpness: 4.20
- color: 4.58
- build: 4.00
- distortion: 4.51
- flare control: 4.26
- overall: 4.31