Short Telephotos on the Q

I'll be heading back to Iceland in the fall, and when I go there I always travel light: one small carry-on and one small backpack. There isn’t much room for camera gear, so I’m going with a couple of Q7s and a few lenses. I shoot a lot of images with a short telephoto so I ran a test to see how well my teles compared to each other. Left to right: Pentax/Cosmicar 12.5mm TV lens, Pentax 02 zoom @15mm, Pentax 06 zoom @15mm, Pentax 110 18mm, Pentax/Cosmicar 25mm TV lens, Kern/Paillard 36mm Yvar, Cosmicar 25mm TV lens, Pentax 06 zoom @25mm.

All were shot at f4.5. I used a double page (below) from a stamp album as a subject, lots of detail. I was about 3 feet away for the shorter lenses, and about 5 feet away for the longer ones:

While center sharpness was very good to excellent on all the lenses the ‘TV’ lenses, the 02 zoom, and the 18mm fared poorly at the corners. Corner sharpness very good on the 06 at both 15mm and 25mm but the biggest surprise was the excellent sharpness at the center and the corners with the Yvar 36mm, a diminutive 8mm movie camera lens from the 50s:

The 06 is obviously the most versatile for auto shooting, but not so good at manual operation. I’m also a little leery of its robustness, I’ve already had one die on me and I’d hate to be stuck with a worthless lens three thousand miles from home. I’ll probably end up taking the Yvar, a 3.2mm Commonlands ultra-wide angle, and the 01 as well as the one big lens, the 50mm f0.95 (for available light.) With a couple of batteries and a charger it should all fit in the bottom of my backpack, with plenty of room to spare.