Vivitar SMS 28mm f/2.8 MC: Perfectly Capable, With One Surprise

The Vivitar SMS 28mm f/2.8 MC is one of those vintage lenses that is perfectly capable of making a good photograph without giving you much reason to get excited about it.

My example, a Minolta MC/MD-mount lens (serial no. 96500619), is capable of producing reasonably sharp images with decent contrast. I shot a variety of subjects with it, including some examples specifically to look at out-of-focus rendering and bokeh. There’s nothing here that made me want to retire my other 28mm lenses, but there’s also nothing fundamentally wrong with its performance.

There was, however, one interesting surprise.

I initially tested the lens with a UV filter attached and noticed a strange veil over some of the images. It became particularly obvious in night photographs containing bright point light sources: highlights flared badly and seemed to fog a much larger portion of the frame.

I wasn’t initially expecting the filter to be the culprit, but removing it produced an immediate and substantial improvement. Contrast came back, the veiling flare was greatly reduced, and the lens behaved much more like I expected it to.

That’s also a useful reminder when testing old lenses: don’t automatically blame the lens. A filter—particularly an older, inexpensive, dirty, damaged, or poorly coated one—can dramatically change how a lens handles strong light sources. If something looks unusually bad, take the filter off before reaching any conclusions about the optics underneath it.

So, is the Vivitar SMS 28mm f/2.8 MC my dream 28mm? Definitely not. I own better 28mm lenses and would normally reach for one of those first.

But if I were stranded on a desert island with this Vivitar as my only lens, and something historically important suddenly happened just before the rescue boat arrived, I wouldn’t hesitate to photograph it.

Then I’d return to civilization and use a better lens.

A note about the sample images: I use LensTagger to add lens information to photographs made with manual lenses, but I don’t necessarily enter the aperture for every individual frame. When testing a lens, I generally photograph the same subject while stopping down sequentially through the marked apertures. So if you see a series of otherwise similar photographs with increasing depth of field and progressively slower shutter speeds, that’s what you’re looking at. For example, with this f/2.8 lens, a typical sequence would be f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11 and so on. The aperture shown in the metadata should therefore only be treated as definitive when I’ve specifically recorded it.

Please note this and similar lenses go up for sale at my UsedFilmCameras.com website.