Minolta MD 28mm f/3.5

Full sun on a market street, ISO 100 film, f/11 at 1/250, and the focus parked at about two and a half meters, which puts everything from a little over a meter to infinity inside the depth of field. You shoot from the chest and hardly look through the finder. On a day like that the Minolta MD 28mm f/3.5 gives up nothing to its faster brothers. Its slow aperture never enters the picture, and neither does the dim finder that comes with it. What you notice by evening is how little it weighs: 160 g in its 1978 form, light enough that you forget which 28 is on the body.

The glass was not new in 1978. Minolta had sold 28mm f/3.5 lenses before, and the five-element, five-group formula used here first showed up in 1975 on an MC lens with a 55 mm thread that stopped at f/16. This MD version stops down to f/22, takes 49 mm filters and focuses reasonably close. It also carries the MD tab, so an X-700 will run it in program with the aperture ring parked at its smallest stop. Minolta's data lists the MD W.Rokkor version from April 1978 at 25,000 yen. The plain MD that followed in June 1981 kept that price and, oddly, put on ten grams, coming in at 170 g. One trap for collectors: Eazypix notes that the MD W.Rokkor 28mm f/3.5 was never sold as a Rokkor-X, so a listing that calls it one deserves a second look at the front ring.

Rokkor Files has little patience for it. The site says the f/3.5 has a poor reputation next to Minolta's f/2.8 and f/2 28mm lenses, and since the f/2.8 is easy to find, there is not much reason to settle for the weaker lens. The speed gap is plain arithmetic: two thirds of a stop behind the f/2.8 and more than a stop and a half behind the f/2. The finder dims to match, so focusing in a dark bar turns into a squint. Nor is this a bokeh lens. At f/3.5 a background only goes properly soft when you work near its minimum focus distance. Treat it as a lens you stop down and leave stopped down, and judge it there.

Used that way, it suits daylight street work, and landscapes at f/11 or f/16 after a long walk in, where a light 28 matters more than a fast one. On a small body like an XG the whole camera stays easy to wear all day. The obvious cross-shop is the MD 28mm f/2.8, which shares the 49 mm thread, so your filters move across, and buys you two thirds of a stop. This was a budget 28 in its day, and the poor reputation means few people go looking for one now. If it turns up bundled with a body, there is little reason to throw it back.

The 49 mm thread matters most with black-and-white film. A yellow or orange filter darkens a summer sky for very little money, and Zone Light Meter can fold the filter factor into its reading, so the light the filter takes is already counted when you pick the aperture. Then preset the focus and get back to the street.