This review of the Yasuhara Momo 100mm f6.4 soft focus lens is both the strangest and most unorthodox review I think I’ve done of a product in a while. Yasuhara is known for creating some really weird things, and so when the company announced their soft focus lens I truthfully expected something with plastic instead of something that looks like the world when I take my glasses off and my astigmatism rears its ugly head.
Gear Used
This lens was tested on the Olympus OMD EM5 and the OMD EM1.
Tech Specs
You’re truthfully just best off checking this out.
Ergonomics
The Yasuhara lens is of the pancake variety. It is manual focus and has a very slow aperture–so it can be made to be quite small overall.
On top, you’ll find a focusing and aperture ring. There is no highly effective depth of field scale so you’ll need to use the EVF of your camera.
Focusing
To be quite honest, unless you’re stopped down all the way to f22 this lens is a nightmare to focus even with focus peaking and enlargement. The lens is so soft that it’s tough for peaking to really work.
I don’t know why it wasn’t just given a lens bellows instead.
Build Quality
One of the best things that this lens has going for it is the build quality. It’s made of all metal and that’s very nice overall. It can take bumps and keep going.
Image Quality
I’m usually the one reviewer on the web that will find a bad lens’s strong qualities, experiment and find a way to create awesome photos with it. You can probably do that if you embrace Olympus’s Art Filters, but otherwise I can say with complete certainty that this lens is the absolute worst I’ve ever tested.
On the back of the LCD screen, the colors really pop. But import them into the computer and try to apply the vivid effects and the image quality will be terrible.
This lens is a bad idea.
Conclusions
I’m not exactly sure where Yasuhara was going with this lens. Yes, it’s got soft focus but it’s also very tough to work with. Honestly, if you smeared some oil on your lens you could probably get a similar effect. Otherwise, what you’ll see is something sort of like what one sees when they’ve got terrible astigmatism.
Don’t get this lens. Really, just don’t.
