If you’re into cheap and quirky lenses, you may have stumbled across the Pentax Auto 110 system. And if you haven’t, then—well, you have now.
Before we start, you should know that I tend to process images in ways that accentuate the character of a lens, and that’s true here, with saturated colours (often very warm-tinted) and strong contrast that exaggerates the vignetting. (Don’t visit this blog for clinical comparisons of optical quality…) That said, most images on this page are out-of-camera JPEGs from the X-E2 and X-T2.
A (very) brief history
The Auto 110 was an SLR film camera made by Pentax in the late 70s and early 80s. It was unusual because it was designed around the 110 film format, which was intended for a market of holidaymakers who wanted hassle-free film loading and tiny cameras and weren’t too fussy about image quality. The idea of creating an SLR system around it was a little absurd.
Thanks to the compactness of the 110 cartridges, the whole system was small. Really small. The compact design also meant that the diaphragm was housed in the camera body: the lenses themselves have a fixed aperture.
What’s on offer?
There are a total of six lenses in the system, of which I have four: the 18mm, the 24mm, the 50mm and the 70mm. All have a fixed f/2.8 aperture. The two remaining lenses are the 18mm fixed panfocal lens and the 20-40mm zoom.
The 18, 24 and 50 are all readily available and can be had quite cheaply, at around £20-30 each. The 70, the zoom and the panfocal 18 are less common and will generally set you back around £70 a pop.
The tricky bit can be finding an adapter, as they no longer seem to be available from manufacturers, at least in the UK. It took me a good few months of keeping an eye out for an X Mount adapter before one appeared on eBay, complete with the 24 and 50mm lenses, for a bit over £60. Shortly after snapping that up, I picked up an 18 with a dose of fungus for £14 and a slightly battered 70 for £20.
So for just over £100, that’s four lenses and the adapter, making a prime kit that fits in a sock. Or pretty much whatever you want to stick them in.
But are they any good?
So… is that £100 well spent, or is it money for old rope?
Let’s be honest: these aren’t going to replace your modern system lenses. They have a ton of character, which is a statement that you can take at face value or interpret as a euphemism. It would be naive to say that they’re crap lenses, because lots of people obtained great results with them on the media they were designed for, but sticking them in front of an APS-C digital sensor inevitably produces results that you’ll either love or hate.
First up, we have vignetting. This is the least surprising quality of these lenses given that the 110 format had a frame of 17x13mm, which is pretty much the same size as a 1” digital sensor and some way short of APS-C.
But, for the most part, the vignetting actually gives a reasonably smooth falloff: you don’t really get the effect of actually hitting the edge of the imaging circle. If it’s a bit too much for your taste, though, you can either correct it in post or you can shrink you sensor by picking up a cheap-as-chips Micro Four Thirds body and adapter—or go even the whole hog and get a (not so cheap) Pentax Q, which is in many ways the digital era’s spiritual successor to the Auto 110 system.
Of course, given the designed image area, things get softer towards the edge, too. These are lenses where you generally need to position a subject centrally. And, of course, there’s no way of stopping down to dampen these characteristics as you would be able to with a variable-aperture lens.
Where things get a little unexpected, though, is field curvature, which all of these lenses have by the bucketload. For the uninitiated, this means that the distance at which a subject is in focus depends on how far it is from the centre of the image: the plane of focus is not a plane, it’s a curve. Normally this just means that if you try to take a picture of a brick wall you’ll be unable to get everything in focus at once (which can lead you to think that a lens isn’t sharp, but it’s not the same thing) but these lenses exhibit the phenomenon to such an extent that you can find distant objects around the edge of your frame coming unexpectedly into focus.
In use
There is a unique pleasure in using these lenses, for a few reasons. Firstly, the lack of aperture control is one less thing to think about. And secondly, they’re just so damn small! Normally I’ll stash a lens cap in the rear pocket of my jeans while I’m shooting, but with these you can chuck the entire collection of lenses in there and not notice them (well, ok, you’ll notice the 70).
Focusing is easy despite the small size. The focusing ring on couple of my copies get a bit stuck once they’ve been left unused, but once the rings are spun once or twice they’re fine.
I tend to find I use the 50 and the 70 most, mainly because the shallower depth of field accentuates the quirky characteristics.
The 24 gets some use, too, because it’s a versatile focal length, and of course it’s ridiculously small.
I use the 18 less: the quirks are a little less strong on this lens, and to be honest I’m not unhappy about the rampant fungus in my copy, as it brings its own optical quirks to the party.
Overall
I’m actually pretty happy with these lenses. I don’t use them all that often, but when you’re out and about in areas that you’ve shot endlessly, they’re a great way of carrying a whole range of options for getting different views of the world. At around £100 for the set, they make a decent collection of pocket-sized fun.
More images
