135mm F2.8 HANIMAR M42 (55) MANUAL FOCUS TELEPHOTO LENS

One of the oldest and most popular mount around, this screw type mount is adopted not only by pentax, but also various other brands. M42 still remains popular these days due to its versatility. With the right adapter, it can be mounted on Canon, Nikon, Sony, Olympus 4/3 and also M4/3 digital bodies, now how useful it that!. Some of us may actually be familar with Russian brands lenses such as Zenitar and Jupiter, which usually have rather rough exteriors, but surprisingly gave very good image quality. However apart from just these, various companies and brands in Japan at that time also came out with their alternatives in the M42 mount. 

Hanimar is one such brand producing lens during that time. As seen from the image above, the design adopted by them, especially the exterior scallop like focusing ring, is very similar to that of pentax. Despite being little known and not costly, this lens does produce some sharp images wide open at F2.8, this is probably an advantage for prime lens, where less abberations are required to be taken care of, thus sharp and high resolution images can still be produced from simplier designs, with lesser glass elements. Now, lesser glass elements also mean that the lens can be made lighter, which is true for this lens, making it easy on the bag.

Though not costly, this lens is not lousy, in fact, pleasantly surprise is the 8 blades aperture adopted by this lens, which gives nicer out of focus highlights, compared to usual budget lenses using 6 bladed ones. The lens uses 58mm filters as well. 

135mm is traditionally already regarded as telephoto, mounted on a canon crop body with aps-c sensor, it becomes eqivalent of a 217mm lens, on M4/3 body, it becomes similar to 270mm F2.8, at this focal length, this lens can already but comfortably used for birding.

Image taken with lens by LENS.sg staff: