When the Minolta MC Rokkor-PF 58mm f/1.8 came up in the random lens generator, married with the Sony A7R IV, I was excited to be out using this lens again. I purchased it in September 2024 for £73 at around the same time as the similarly vintaged Minolta MC 50mm f/1.4. The latter I have had issues with sharpness and focusing, but on the occasions with the former I have been really happy with its performance and loving the classic Minolta colours it produces.

According to online sources, there are two versions of this lens. As I have a copy with the serial number greater than 5064519, I have the MC II version which is said to be optically superior to its predecessor and was first produced by Minolta way back in 1969 after the MC I debuted in 1966. Forgetting about the optical quality of the lens I reckon from a purely aesthetical point of view it is probably my favourite lens in terms of aesthetics. It effortlessly pulls off cool late 1960s vibes especially when it is wearing its lens cap, which is simply super cool.

Like my M42 lenses I’ve attached the Minolta MD mount lens to my Sony A7R IV using and MD adapter to the Techart LA-EA9 adapter which provides very solid autofocus to this old manual focus lens. If I was not using the AF functionality, the focusing ring is a joy to use and I have been able to manually focus on occasion fairly easily. At f/1.4 the lens is fairly soft (but pleasing for portraits), but once you start stopping down the lens quickly sharpens up and when pixel peaking a properly focused image I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between this and a (more expensive) modern lens.

For my extended school run walk about Grantham I again chose to shoot black and white jpegs with the raw to be used later for colour versions of the images I took. Given that I was most excited about the Minolta colours and the promise of a blood sky sunset thanks to Saharan dust (that never materialised) shooting in black and white may have been a little non-sensical but as with some of the vintage lenses I have used before, the Minolta 58mm in black and white mode produces a very authentic late 1960s / 70s look that I am very familiar with (and like) when working through vintage archives in my professional capacity.

As much as I liked the black and white images, it was a pleasure to go through the raw files and enjoy the colours in particular that this lens produces. The setting sun in some instances didn’t bring out the best of the lens; it was more flat hour than golden hour. Still there were a handful of pictures that I like and for an hour or so long walk on a well trodden route, that is not a bad return.

So another short, but enjoyable, session with my randomly generated lens and camera combo. If you are interested in vintage lenses I would highly recommend getting hold of the Minolta MC Rokkor 58mm f/1.4. A good copy is relatively inexpensive – as I write this I think a little less expensive than what I paid for mine – is easily adaptable to mirrorless cameras and is well capable of not only providing much cherished character but optically it is capable of delivering too – which is not the case for many vintage lenses.