I bought this Panagor 21mm f4 lens for 20 pounds on Facebook. Which is a really nice price and it was also to my surprise in a very great condition, no haze, no scratches, no fungus, just clean.
A reason why I bought this lens is that I think this would be a great affordable alternative to the Mir-20m 20mm f3.5 lens which is supposed to be a copy of the Zeiss Jena Flektogon 20mm f4 lens. As Mir-20m prices have risen to the same price as the Zeiss being sold around 400 to 600 bucks, which aren’t really in the realm of being affordable.
While the Panagor 21mm f4 can be found for more affordable prices, but this lens is also sold as Vivitar 20mm f3.8 , as they are both manufactured by Kino Precision Optics also known as Kiron, both have identical schematics, just unsure why they don’t have the same focal length and aperture. But these lenses can be found for a fraction of the Zeiss and Mir, as I can find Vivitar sold for 50 to 150 bucks and I bought my Panagor for 20 bucks.
If we compare the schematics with the Zeiss Flektogon, it was quite a surprise that Panagor and Vivitar actually have a similar design to the Zeiss Flektogon 20mm f4. Could almost say it’s a Japanese Zeiss copy.
Now back to the lens, the Panagor has a front filter thread of 82mm, same as the Vivitar. I am able to mount a VND filter on it without vignetting, however because it is such an ultra wide angle lens, you just can’t really be bothered with clamping on a matte box especially when you use this lens on a full frame sensor, most matte boxes would vignette with such a wide lens.
The Panagor I’ve bought has a M42 mount, but it is als available in other SLR mounts like Nikon F, Pentax K, Canon FD and more. I am using a fusnid adapter to adapt it to EF mount like most of my lenses.
Also because this lens is so wide, you can easily capture wide landscapes, wide establishing shots of buildings and streets. The image of the lens is sharp enough to capture a good usable image and when you aim the lens at a brick wall we can see some barrel distortions and that the side is a tad soft, but using this lens on APSC would crop away most of the soft sides or if you just close down the aperture most will get in focus. Panning the lens we can see a lot of perspective distortions, but this is mostly due to the fact that it’s such an ultra wide angle lens.
Capturing an image of a person a medium shot would still look fine, however getting close up the perspective distortion and make the person look quite distorted, which could fit with a crazy vibe for a crazy scene.
Even though this is a wide angle lens, you can focus all the way to 16 cm from the sensor and get really crazy close up shots. Capturing plants and more in a way you have never seen before as you are just a few centimeters away from the front of the glass. And depending on the lighting you have to avoid causing your own shadow onto the subject.
At the closest focus to my surprise at f4 you get a very smooth blurred background. But also capturing small objects this lens can get quite nice blurred out backgrounds behind the subject. Rack fossing on leafs we can see there is a slight swirl with oval bokeh when we focus to minimum focus, however it is not a very pronounced effect when focussing an object that is further away as this is quite a wide angle lens and have a deep focus already when you focus on items half a meter away.
This lens does suffer from focus breathing, but its only noticeable if you are doing a long rack focus fast. The focus ring rotate 300 degrees which is quite long for accurate focussing, though this lens focuses from 16 cm and hits infinity around 4-5 meters, it does feel more difficult to rack focus from close to infinity in a single smooth way.
The focus ring on the Panagor has a diameter of 70mm if you want to know which size follow focus gear you need to buy.
Also even though this lens is so wide it doesn’t seem to have a lot of flare issues, it’s quite tame and doesn’t lower contrast or haze. It just has some curved streaks that happen when you aim it as a hard lightsource. Only under a very specific angle you get a full circle flare which doesn’t often happen.
The aperture ring is on the back of the lens and it goes from f4 to f22 in quite big steps. The lens has 6 aperture blades which does result in hexagon bokeh when you close down the lens.
Filming at night you have to worry about the street lights shining into the lens, but what you mostly have to worry about is the small aperture of f4 which doesn’t give you a bright image and I had to push my ISO to ISO6400 to 12800 to capture images with a proper exposure.
Main drawback of this lens is it being f4, but reality nowadays most new cameras can handle high iso a lot better and even filming at night with an f4 lens shouldn’t be an issue. Though it is a wide f4 lens you can still get a bit of shallow DOF if you film close enough. This lens also is quite a nice combo with a gimbal, the lens might look big but it isn’t too heavy with 350 grams.
My conclusion is I would have preferred a faster lens, but this is a good affordable alternative lens for the Mir-20m. Also you might want to build up a Panagor and Vivitar mixed lens set though they aren’t all Zeiss copies, they do have a lot of interesting fast f2 lenses. But overall the lens does a great job as an ultra wide lens, especially at the time of recording this video the prices are still quite affordable compared to a lot of other ultra wide vintage lenses, also the wider the lens more often the harder they are to find and could become more expensive in the future, when more people get to know about this lens.
