Sony a7r with Hasselblad lenses

I plan on getting a Sony a7r soon, yet I have a stable of Hasselblad v-system lenses. One of the great things about the a7r is that because its mirrorless, it has a very short lens mount to sensor distance. Much shorter than a conventional SLR. Because a conventional SLR lens is designed to be mounted further away from the sensor plane, there is plenty of room to fit a conversion mount between the a7r and a conventional lens. Thus the field is wide open for third party manufacturers to make adaptors that allow all sorts of other lenses to be mounted to the Sony, from many other lens manufacturers.

The gold standard in third party adaptors is MetaBones, but there are also other manufactures catering for more esoteric mounting systems.

A friend of mine (Tom) has the a7r, and he has purchased a Kipon adaptor that mates the Hasselblad v-system lenses to the Sony. So, we gave it a try the other day, and here are my first thoughts.

The Kipon mount is quite well made, and it includes a 1/4″ tripod mount, which is handy because the Hasselblad lenses are quite heavy in comparison to the Sony lenses.

I tried it with a range of lenses, but here is a shot with the 80mm Planar.

I am going to report on the image quality down the track when I have had a better play.

For now I want to talk about an odd issue we discovered – lens flare.

Irrespective of the lens we tried, we got a significant lens flare, which you can see in the next shot.

Notice the flare extending from the top middle in a big washed out ‘v’ shape.

We had to resort to a fairly significant lens hood to combat the problem.

I have never experienced this on the Hasselblad under normal circumstances, and the Sony/Ziess lenses that  Tom uses on the Sony, in exactly the same camera position, did not suffer the problem.

I’ll do some more tests to see if we can isolate the problem, and report back in a future post.