Topcor R 25mm 3.5

Impressions:  This is another magical product from the magicians at Topcon Kogaku.   Amazing color and sharpness at every aperture.   From time to time you can find these little gems on ebay for around $150.  The pictures below tell you all the story:

Here is a sample of Topcor's painterly colors.  Notice that blacks are nice and black.

This lens focuses down to around 6"!!!!

Here is a picture of the interior of the National Portrait Gallery

Check out the 100% blowup from the extreme corner of the above image.  Why cant Canon learn how to do this.

Below please find a 100% crop of the above handheld 10 megapixel image.  Wow.  Pure magic.  You can even see the loose fibers sticking out from the hat.

Mod:  Unfortunately this 25mm, being in Exakta mount, needs the mount to be shaved before the mount clears the Canon 5DII's mirror.  Even after shaving the mount, the rear element interferes with 5DIIs mirror at infinity.  There is a shroud and rear filter holder behind this lens's rear element.  Without removing these items I get infinity focus between f3.5 and f5.6.  Removing the shroud and filter holder may do the trick but I have not yet figured how to remove them.  Please let me know if you know how.

Top Tip:  The nice click of the aperture ring is created by a 1mm ball bearing riding on an indented surface within the lens.  When you open up any Topcor R lens, there is a good likelihood that you will loose the little ball bearing.  I have bought 100 of these 1mm bearings from ebay for a couple of dollars.

Here are some pictures of Topcon Topcor R 25mm f3.5 on Canon 5DII:

Here is a picture with filter holder and a filter.  The filter holder takes series 9 filters.

Rating:  8 out of 10