This is the Makinon 24mm f2.8, a brand and lens you might have never heard of. I saw this lens on a used market site for a while, I never heard of the brand, but there also isn’t any in-depth reviews about this lens, so I took a gamble on this as vintage 24mm f2.8 are getting rare to come by and especially costing only 20 bucks.
Though this Makinon Branded version is quite rare, the lens has been sold under the brands Hanimex and Toyo Optics USA. And out of the two, it seems the Hanimex is the easiest to find and there are a lot of them on Ebay selling for various affordable prices.
So in this video I am going to test out my Mikanon 24mm f2.8 and see if this is a good lens at all.
History
But first a brief history about Makina Optical, it was a Japanese company founded in 1967. Makina made OEM lenses for distributor brands like Vivitar ,Hanimex and Toyo Optics. In 1974 they started selling lenses under their own brand name Makinon. Their strategy was to sell affordable but high performance lenses. Makina Optical stopped operations in the 1980s as consumers switched to the auto focus camera system.
Before I am able to test this lens, let’s do a simple cinemod. The focus ring has a diameter of 62mm , the seamless gear ring I placed on it is the Tilta 59 to 61mm which gives it a good snug fit as one size larger is loose. The front filter thread is 55mm and I place an 55 to 77mm, 80mm O.D. ring on it to fit with the rest of my lenses. The version of this lens that I’ve bought has a Pentax K mount and I adapted it to EF, however this lens can also be found with different kinds of vintage lens mounts.
It being a 24mm lens of course it’s great for capturing wide cityscapes and landscapes. Getting those nice establishing shots, wide open the side of the image is soft but not distractingly soft like some other lenses, but definitely focus sharp right in the centre of the image.
There is some barrel distortion, but in most cases images it’s not noticeable, just avoid aiming your camera at a brick wall. The lens does have a vignette , where the center of the image is brighter than the side, causing the feeling that the background or things on the side looks very underexposed and stopping down to f4 it will go away.
The lens has an 8 blade aperture which does a good job of keeping the bokeh round in the center of the image. Talking about the bokeh we of course have to talk about the swirly bokeh of this lens and it swirls really nicely like the Helios and in the soviet lens lineup there is no 24mm and this lens actually fills in that gap well.
To get the swirl you would need move closer to your subjects, as in a medium shot there is some hint of swirl, but mostly giving a nice out of focus background with an anamorphic like texture especially when we letterbox this shot to scope.
In the close ups is where you really see the swirl happening behind your subject. But the minimum focus is at 25cm which means you can get right in the face of your subject and get extreme close ups and get some big oval bokeh. But also feel at closest focus you can get a lot of really interesting images, especially filming through tall wheatgrass.
This lens does suffer from quite strong lens flares and haze, it’s also noticeable haze and flares aren’t neutral and add a warming effect to the image. Using a matte box to hold off lens flares is recommended.
Also at night it is recommended to still use a matte box as the wide angle some bright street lights can cause the image to haze up or capture unwanted lens flares. Also headlights from car’s can cause some unwanted flares.
It being an f2.8 lens filming at night I had to bump up the iso to 3200 to get decent exposure. And I really needed to look for subjects close to street lights or window light from shops. As for wider angle shots would need to bump up iso, if the building is not well lit up from the street lights.
Overall the lens can produce really nice images, can focus nicely and close up. And I can put it in my collection of swirly lenses.
Something I found out by opening the lens and checking the elements, it seems to have a very similar lens schematics to the Minolta MC Rokkor 24mm f2.8, having 9 elements in 7 groups and also has very similar warm flares. Though from online research I could not find any connections between the two companies.
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