Glass Vs Plastic (The Initial Result)

You might have seen my original post on this a few days ago. Well I promised the rest of the findings. Just to recap we get a lot of questions about the difference between Glass and Plastic lenses and I decided that the only real way to find out what the real world difference is was to shoot with two cameras in identical situations to see.

Well it was a fairly gloomy day when I took the test shots so I’m not 100% sure if this was a fair comparison between the two, When the sun comes out I’m planning to run the test again to see if there are any differences between the two in terms of colours and contrast, as you can see from the sample pictures there isn’t really any difference from those aspects. The test rig currently has two rolls of black and white film in half shot, so I will post those results soon as well.

Shot 1: Palm Trees On The Common

Shot 2: Clarence Pier

Shot 3: Flats

Shot 4: The Common

Shot 5: Antiques

The colour reproduction differs very little between the two lenses and the contrast seems very similar on both, but that might be my scanner auto correcting one of them.

As you can see in Shots 1 and 3 the plastic lens has a significant amount of barrel distortion and all the shots show that the plastic is has more ‘blur’ around the edge, but both are pretty sharp in the centre.

If you look at the sky in shots 2 and 4 you can see there isn’t any noticeable difference in the exposure of the lenses either.

I’m not going to draw any kind of conclusions, you can do that yourself, and as we sell Holgas I don’t want you to think we’re pushing a particular version of the camera, but as you can see there are reasonable differences to think about before you purchase, but maybe not that many to spend hours agonising about it.

P.S. we get a lot of ‘But the plastic lens is the original lens though’. This isn’t really that valid, there have been glass versions of the holga around since the very beginning, they where originally called  the ‘Woca’ .