Pentacon Auto MC 50mm 1:1.8, An Album Page

Looking at the Pentacon Auto MC 50mm 1:1.8, a 40-year-old legacy 'cult classic' acknowledged for its color and soap bubble bokeh characteristics.

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The Pentacon Auto MC 50mm 1:1.8, a legacy 'cult classic' acknowledged for its color and soap bubble bokeh characteristics, is a product from East Germany (the former German Democratic Republic - GDR), by Meyer-Optik, Gorlitz. The compact and well-built all-metal-and-glass lens with 6 elements in 4 groups and a slightly rounded 6-blade iris, is said to be a direct descendant of the Meyer-Optik Görlitz Oreston 50 mm f/1.8. The lens has a diameter of 60mm, is 38mm deep, weighs 194 grams, takes 49mm filters, and focuses down to 0.33 meters. Production of the lens was said to have started in the 1960s.

The lens has a quite long focus throw, at 320° from the minimum focusing distance to infinity, which is good for precise focusing at close distances. It is also easy enough to set the aperture between click stops, as the lens is embedded with 6 click stops from 1.8 to f/2.5 and 1/2 clicks beyond that.

While good working copies of this 40-year-old lens work as expected, with color-characterized images that are soft wide open, and sharp when stopped down to f/5.6 or f/8, the main ailment that seems to affect others are stiffened, or otherwise, loose focus rings. On PentaxForums, the lens enjoys a Sharpness rating of 9.3, Aberrations of 8.5, Bokeh of 9.3, Handling of 8.3, and Value of 10.0.

The lens, seen with M42 and Practica B lens mounts, is also available with different (optically identical) iterations and varying multi-coating applications. These include:

• The initial iteration with silver stripes on the aperture ring, branded “electric” or “auto”.
• The follow-up iteration with no stripes on the aperture ring, but with two silver rings at the front of the lens.
• The third iteration, still with one silver ring at the front, and a focus ring with a spiked profile.
• The final iteration, perhaps the most common, is all black.

Album Images

On the Camera

These images were shot with the Pentacon Auto MC 50mm 1:1.8 adapted to an APS-C Canon EOS 300D digital SLR camera with an M42 lens adapter, with crops and exposure tweaks on the desktop image editor. On the Canon, the lens is equivalent to a 75mm short tele on a 35mm full-frame, a focal length highly recommended for head-and-shoulder portraits, candid shots in event photography, discreet shots in street photography, and for nature, wildlife, product, and detail shots. With the minimum focus distance, the lens is also excellent for close-ups.

Canon EOS 300D, Pentacon Auto MC 50mm 1:1.8

The Canon EOS 300D (EOS Digital Rebel in the US, EOS Kiss Digital in Japan), launched by Canon in 2003, was the first entry-level digital SLR camera system priced below US $1000. The vintage features a 6.3MP CMOS sensor and is the first to be fitted with the EF-S lens mount, a derivative of the EF lens mount built for Canon digital SLR cameras with APS-C sensors. Lens adapters for mounting other OEM lenses are easily available for the EF-S lens mount system.

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