A sharp wee number

Note the Newton's Rings near the top. Haven't seen them in a while!

Unbelievably, it was more than a year ago that I shot a roll of film on my OM2n with the fabled Zuiko 50mm f2 macro. I had intended to do a few prints to see what they would look like but, for some reason, never got round to it. The negatives looked nice and the scans were OK but the proof of the silver gelatin pudding is in the eating.

So at the end of a wee darkroom session I looked out the OM2 negs and did a couple of quick prints. The photographs are nothing special, just walkabout shots, but I'm still swithering over what to do with the lens so I thought it was a worthwhile effort.

The film was Agfa APX 100 developed in D76 1+1 and they were printed through a Minolta CE Rokkor. The results are very nice. The two full frame prints on this page are almost straight scans (just a little levels tweaking) and they haven't been sharpened. I did apply light sharpening to the crops.

The main prints were 150 dpi scans and the crops were done at 1200 dpi. They say you can't really get much more than 200 dpi out of a print but I thought I'd do them nice a big anyway. When you click on the crop to enlarge it, bear in mind how big the print would be if I'd scanned the whole thing at that resolution.

For quick handheld shots, these prints are lovely and sharp. The Zuiko is obviously a class act and lives up to its reputation, one that was launched by Michael Johnston when he used to write a weekly column for The Luminous Landscape. Seeing these prints doesn't really help me much as I'm still undecided whether to keep or sell the Zuiko. But with Delta 100 and the camera on a tripod I doubt you'd get much sharper from 35mm.