Olympus 41.17mm f/4.82 Industrial Lens
This industrial lens is available now eBay now for $20 of so, is the performance worth the cost?
QUICK LENS SPECS
Olympus 41.17mm f/4.82 Industrial Lens
Lens type: microfilm reader lens
Aperture: f/4.87
Iris: fixed
Focal length: 41.17mm
Mounting Threads: none
Filter Mounting Threads: none
Forward or Reverse Mount: Reverse, small diameter forwards
Country of origin: Japan
Used Market Price: new condition, $20. USD on eBay.
QUICK LENS REVIEW
What I like about the lens
-Price
-Chromatic aberration correction
Things that I dislike about the lens
-Small image circle
-Sharpness could be better
-Slow maximum aperture
Performance at 2.1x on APS-C
The test setup was stacked with a Mejiro 5.6/90 scan lens, one of my standard tube lenses. Due to the slow aperture I would not use this lens focused at 2x on extension only. Mounting was easy, the lens slips inside of a Thorlabs SM1 lens tube which is easy to install in my studio setup with adapters.
100% view Olympus 41.17mm f/4.82 at 2.1x
The sharpness out of this lens at this magnification is decent, the chromatic aberration suppression was very good, much better than an enlarger lens, even better than APO labeled enlarger lenses like an APO-Rodagons.
Even with the great chromatic aberration control I would not recommend this lens due to poor coverage unfortunately. See the image above , the areas outside the rectangle are not sharp, even with image stacking.
For $20 the lens performance is okay and the coverage is no worse than most of the Nikon microscope objectives that I own, but I would not recommend the Olympus 41.17mm lens for macro photography. The Tominon 35mm f/4.5 has similar CA correction with much better coverage for just a few dollars more. See the Tominon test here on Closeuphotography.com: https://www.closeuphotography.com/tominon-35mm