I came across this Olympus mount Hoya HMC Tele-Auto 135 mm f/2.8 lens in a bargain bin. I had just found out a rather large Japanese lens manufacture—Sigma, who then go on to do the final grinding, polishing, coating and assembling—started manufacturing their complex lenses by ordering the individual lens element blanks from Hoya. Hoya is one of the largest lens element manufacturers in Japan. Before finding that out, I had only known Hoya for their filters.
Now I had an actual lens made by Hoya!
It has a pull-out lens hood.
There doesn’t seem to be anything outstanding about this lens. The standard 35 mm staple lenses with reasonable apertures no larger than f/2.8—28 mm, 35 mm and 135 mm—all seem to have the same number of elements and groupings. There simply isn’t any reason to re-invent the wheel, but how well you do making a good final lens is probably more dependent on your quality control and insistence on maintaining your reputation than playing with the lens designs.
It is an impressive chunk of glass. Stare into this liquid pool of a front element. Isn’t that mesmeriz-ing? That lettering is clear, the filter threads faultless and the fit of retaining ring to filter threads to outer lens hood exactly concentric.
Moving to the lens mount, the crispness of depth-of-field marks married to the infrared (red) correction mark couldn’t be better. The f-stops are engraved and then filled with black paint. The Olympus f/stop step-down button mimics the placement and style of the original Olympus lenses.
I don’t have an Olympus camera or lens handy so I can’t check if the focus direction is the same. All Olympus manufactured lenses rotate the same direction to focus, but after-market lenses adapted to different manufacturer’s mounts sometimes focus the opposite direction depending on who they are adapted to. It is a small point, you can adapt particularly in single focal length lenses because once mounted you will be doing all you focusing the same for awhile.
The closest focus distance is not marked clearly. It is under five feet (1.5 m) but exactly how far is unknown. Still it would seem pretty comparable with the normal 50 mm lenses near focus distance framing—at a much greater distance.
The lens came in this original Hoya marked hard leather case. The Hoya HMC Tele-Auto 135 mm f/2.8 is a quality performer all the way to the smallest details.
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