Sony A7C + Olympus OM 100mm 2.8 (Forty Year Old) Legacy Vintage Lens Test

This is not a followtheboat episode, this a 40 year old legacy lens test… As you may know we use a Panasonic GH5 for our vlogs and it’s a real workhorse. However I was missing my photography using my old lenses, so earlier this year we bought the Sony A7C, the world’s smallest full-frame mirrorless camera. With a sensor twice the size of the GH5 it’s great for low-light photography. Well, it turns out it’s not just a great stills camera. The video capabilities on it are pretty cool too.

Now let’s not get carried away here. The GH5 has built-in, top-rated stabilisation, making it king for vlogging, especially on a boat. The Sony’s stabilisation leaves a lot to be desired, so it’s not (yet) replacing our beloved vlogging camera.

A7C
On the other hand, the quality of the videos from the A7C is top-notch. It has all the same features of the Sony A7iii (yeah, the one I dropped in the sea) but they’ve packed it into a smaller housing and improved the colour science, something that Sony was often criticised for (colour science just means the rendition of natural colours in-camera). And despite not recording 10bit internally like the GH5 does, the full-frame sensor is pulling in a lot of detail. Although my legacy lenses are purely mechanical with no electronics, meaning everything is manual focus, the auto-focus features on the A7C when paired with a modern lens are fast and precise. There are other compromises and benefits with this camera but I won’t go into those except to say…

The Problem With Modern Equipment
The problem with modern, digital camera equipment is that they are so refined they introduce ‘digital sharpness’. You may have noticed this, especially if you have a 4K TV or monitor. It can be distracting, ending up looking ‘too real’. On our followtheboat vlogs we always dial down the sharpness to give it a more ‘cinematic’ look, but another way of achieving the ‘cinematic’ look is to use older, analogue lenses. They were made before computers were part of the production process and so they inherited ‘characteristics’. Some people might call these ‘faults’: softness in the edges, flare from sunlight, different tints due to aging lens coatings, and so on.

Olympus 100mm 2.8
I like the old Olympus OM lenses. They produce a ‘warm’ image when compared to other lenses, and they’re smaller than their full-frame counterparts from other manufacturers. In short, they are ideal for the traveling cinematographer.

This particular lens probably dates from the late 70s to early 80s. It’s a telephoto, meaning it has a long focal length ideal for portraits. Lenses at this length separate the subject from the background and, with a shallow depth of field, the bokeh (blurry background) is pleasing. And funnily enough, my copy of this lens has a fair bit of mold in the glass!

Using it on a modern camera, however, requires precision. Because it’s manual, effort is required to nail the focus, and when the aperture is opened up (maximum f/2.8 on this lens), the depth of field is shallow, so misjudging the focus results in blurry footage. Fortunately, the A7C has a few tricks up its sleeve to help out.

Stop rambling, you nerd
OK, so these clips were all recorded in January 2021 between 4-6pm. The camera was mounted on a tripod and features both normal clips at 30fps and slow-motion clips at 120fps. ‘Pulling focus’, where you rotate the focus ring to shift between foreground and background, was difficult because my tripod is a cheap piece of crap.

I said stop rambling
Sorry, I just had to make my excuses! Without further ado, here are the results. Let us know what you think.