The Ultra Wide Heliar 12mm is the new adition to my lens collection, and the second lens for my Bessa Rangefinder camera. Cosina has two very wide lenses in their product lineup, the 15mm f3.6 and the 12mm f5.6. I decided with the latter one, because I wanted to go realy ultra wide.
The lens comes with a small hood and an external 12mm viewfinder, which is amazing bright and a joy to look through. Thought the viewfinder has absolutly no markins for helping you level the camera, nor does it help you if you do close up focus. The manual describes how the picture shifts if you focos on the closes - which is 30cm.
Build Quality is for a lack of a word stunning. Like the Nokton 40mm it is made out of solit metal, including the lens hood. The Aperture wheel has clicks stops for each half stop which are solid and do not move by themselves, even if you might brush over them. It does not have the same hubs as the Nokton, but you will less change the aperture here, because of the very low focus on infinite.
The focus wheel has a small metal knob that helps you move it and it has click stops at 0.5m and 1m. Because the lens has a very shallow infinite point you can set it to 1m and f8 and you are set for just clicking away - except you should check the shutter speed.
Which bringts me to another point. The lens is fairly slow, actually very slow compared to the avery speed of my lens collection I have. f5.6 is slow and because of the still very strong vignetting at f5.6 you will use it most at f11 or more and then you need a fast film, ISO400, to be able to shoot at proper shutter speeds.
On my first day, it was cloudy, dark cloudy and I used an Ilford Super XP2 iso 400 and when it became more dark towards the evening I found myself fighting with shutter speeds below 1/15s. I later used a Fuji Super Presto iso 1600, but still, if its too dark, you can forget it to use it handheld.
So this is a thing you have to consider, you get ultra wide 12mm, but at a price of lower speed and vignetting. I do not own the 15mm lens, but with f4.6 it is way faster. Thats one full stop, and thats something you meed need. If you need even more faster and you can live with medium wide, you can always look at the ultra 28mm with f1.9, but we are here at the ultra wides.
So how does the lens hold up on the pictures? Well I shot several rolls of Film, Fuji Neopan, Ilford, Fuji Natura, Fuji Supera, Fuji Reala, Fuji Pro 400 and the lens is very stunning. I have not yet uploaded many shots, so I cannot post many here, but I guide you to my flickr set of this lens where I will add all the shuts I upload.
One thing I have to say about it: Be very careful with your hands. The lens is very small and really very wide. I have several shots “destroyed” because my left fingers are visible in the lens. It seems I hold the camera in a very strange style, probably because I more used to a bigger body like the 30D, so whenever I use this lens I really take care my hands and especially fingers are flat to the body. Besides that I didn’t run into any troubles.
And a second thing: This is not a people lens, because of its very ultra wide type everything will be very strong distorted. It works very well with distance objects like buildings, or some inside shots. But beware of people on the side, they look kinda stringe
Below some example pictures. All were scanned with an Epson GT-X900 at 4800 dpi.
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