Samples from the impressive Minolta 50mm f/1.7 prime

This is a post featuring some pictures I took today with a Minolta 50mm f/1.7 prime lens fitted to my Sony NEX 6 mirrorless camera. It’s a similar post to one I did a while back when I used the Pentax 50mm f/1.7 on the same camera.

Since the pictures using this lens were taken in the same locations around Stevenage as I used with the Pentax lens, quite a few are of similar scenes, so it’s possible to do some comparisons between the two lenses.

Minolta 50mm f/1.7 sample pictures

In many ways this lens is very similar to the Pentax K-Mount lens. They are of the same vintage, are both 50 mm f/1.7, are of approximately the same size and weight and in fact seem fairly similar in performance, at least on the few sample pictures I’ve taken so far. It’s fitted with a Minolta SR mount, so I used a cheap NEX – SR mount adaptor from Amazon and took all the above pictures on Aperture priority mode.

Although the images looked a bit dull and lifeless on first import into Lightroom, they punched up nicely when I went through my standard Lightroom workflow with them.

I got this lens on a Minolta X-300 35 mm SLR which I received as part of a bundle when I purchased a National PE-387S thyristor flash from e-bay. The manual flash was the part I wanted, but the X-300 and a couple of extra lenses were pleasant additional items.