02/23/2026
As a Christmas gift to myself, I bought a massive 250mm f/5.5 Mamiya Press lens to use on . It's about as heavy as a 70-200 f/2.8 for full frame digital, but the front element is huge, with a whopping 105mm filter thread.
As I suspected, it doesn't quite cover Instax Wide (see second photo*). What I didn't expect is that the coverage circle is largely uniform across all focus distances; I was hoping for better coverage at portrait ranges. That tells me that the limiting factor isn't necessarily the optics, but probably the lens mount itself.
I did a little experimenting and found one bit of focus range around 14m that mostly covers Instax Wide. I think that's the sweet spot between the actual optical circle and the mechanical limits of the lens mount.
This does limit the utility with Instax Wide to dark scenes or black backdrops, but I somewhat expected that. I was thinking more about using this with Instax Mini, which fits easily in the image circle at all distances, for events & concerts.
Those Mamiya engineers really squeezed every possible ounce of performance out of their Press cameras.
(No lens pics yet, I'll do a glamor gear shoot with it soon.)
