The good, the bad and the ugly (lenses)

As a fairly recent MILC convert, I'm still fascinated by the ability to easily adapt almost any lens to my camera. I currently have 3 adapters - Nikon F mount, M42 and 39mm Leica thread - and a pile of old lenses gathering dust that I've been working through to see what they can do on the Sony a6000.

 

There have been a couple of surprises; mainly that old Pentax Super-Takumars ain't really that super -despite their one time high reputation. And that 'cheap' Praktica lenses (and some Russian lenses) usually knock spots off them.

 

Pity about the old Takumars, they're generally small and lightweight.... and disturbingly fuzzy!

 

Anyhow. The real point of this thread is to open it up to contributions.

 

What lenses have you tried? Any surprises, cheap gems, unexpected fails?

 

To kick it off.

 

My first surprise find was a Jupiter 8. Small, fairly lightweight and with astonishingly good IQ and no colour fringing. Useable even wide open at f/2. Only negative is its tendency to flare.

 

Major fail was a 28mm f/3.5 Super-Takumar. Very poor in every respect at all apertures. A great pity, since its small size fitted the camera well.

 

Two more pleasant surprises.

1. A Zeiss Jena Pentacon 35mm f/2.4 Flektagon. Clinically crisp from wide open, but with a rather cool colour rendering.

2. A 55mm f/1.8 Fujica in M42 fit. Quite a small and neat lens with excellent IQ from wide open, and a warm colour rendering.

 

Over to you.

Recommendations, sleepers and 'absolute dogs' please.

My Nikon lenses are old enough to started with film, and graduated to 12 MP digital cameras. I no longer use them on an MILC because they are fuzzy in the corners and not much better in the center wider than f/5.6. Leica and their Zeiss RF counterparts shorter than 50 mm suffer from corner smearing. I hear that Leica R (SLR) lenses are better, but I'm past caring.

 

A Leica Summicron 90/2, 1960's vintage, is a very good match, although very heavy. It's rendering is very sharp, but on the neutral to cold side compared to modern lenses. I still uses a Tele-Elmar 135/4. It is very sharp, even wide open, and has pleasant rendering. It is also very small and easy to carry for landscapes and such.

 

Of course some older lenses, like a Leitz Summitar, have unusual rendering characteristics that some adore. I look for sharpness, low CA, and good bokeh. If I want special effects, I let a dog lick the lens and don't clean it off. (In the real world, the only lens-lickings are done by my sons' pets.)

I've had a few good surprises using legacy lenses on my m4/3 body, notably:

Vivitar Series 1 135mm f/2.8 in a Pentax screw mount

Olympus OM 50mm MC Auto-macro f/3.5

Nikon Nikkor H.C. 50mm f/2 in a Leica thread mount

The Pentax Super Taks I have (50/1.4 and 55/2) were very good, but better on film.

Leica Summicron 50 is absolutely gorgeous on the A7 (and equally so on the A6300). I cannot imagine a better 50, and the Sonys handle so well with manual focus lenses, far better than the old cameras they were made for.

 

I have a Nikon adapter and a Nikkor AIS 35/2 works great, as does a 28/3.5 PC lens.

 

If you want ugly -- none of the wide angle Leica or Voigtlander lenses works worth a d*** on the A7.

If you want ugly -- none of the wide angle Leica or Voigtlander lenses works worth a d*** on the A7.

 

- I've heard that from a few people now; yet in the early days of mirrorless technology, one of the advantages of a short register was supposed to be compatibility with non-retrofocus wideangles.

 

"If I want special effects, I let a dog lick the lens and don't clean it off. (In the real world, the only lens-lickings are done by my sons' pets.)"

 

- I've not yet been tempted to lick any lens, even one with a nice white coating of frost on it!

- I've not yet been tempted to lick any lens, even one with a nice white coating of frost on it!

Dogs aren't all that fussy.

At the beginning of 2018 I ordered my X-E1 but the XC16-50 was defective so I fell back to my M39 Jupiter-8. Love the lens except for no click stops. Then I put a Minolta MD50 on another adapter. . .Heaven! Now and then the MD50 gets put to work on close-ups. When the camera is in manual mode, focusing is a snap. Here is the MD lens over in Maui. Bill

My best find was a Jupiter-11 135/4 in L39 mount. This is the smallest version of the Jupiter-11 and it sits well on an M4/3 body.

 

I'm aware that not all Jupiters were created equal and I think I got one of the good ones - it is sharp and contrasty with a nice natural colour rendition.

Another very good one, less surprisingly, is the Minolta MD 200/4 (and mine was even cheaper than the Jupiter). It's a lot bigger than the Jupiter but bearing in mind the crop factor here, it's a fairly beefy telephoto in a small package.

My best find was a Jupiter-11 135/4 in L39 mount. This is the smallest version of the Jupiter-11 and it sits well on an M4/3 body.

 

- Smart! It looks as if it could have been made for the Olympus.

I'm aware that not all Jupiters were created equal and I think I got one of the good ones

 

My experience is that most people with Soviet lenses feel obliged to put in the caveat that "they weren't even in quality" etc. But usually the one they have is OK.

 

I have a lot of these beasties, and nearly every one is at least good, and some are spectacular. The only problem I have found is that something over time may fog the interior lens surfaces.

This has normally not been a problem for me.

 

A few of my Red Stars in Kiev (Contax) mount

A few of my favorites are, in no particular order, The Olympus 28mm 3.5, The Nikon 100mm 2.8 series e (makes for a rather compact fast 200mm tele on M4/3) and the too heavy for M4/3 Nikon 28mm F2 which is just plain crazy sharp on M4/3. Edited October 26, 2018 by mjferron

Leica 35mm and 50 Summicrons seem to work very nicely on my Fuji X-Pro2 and Panasonic GX7.

Re JDMvW comment, I also have a Jupiter-8 (50mm) and it is just not in the same league as the Jupiter-11, so I think there is something in this QC issue in the Russian lenses.

I didn't mention the 8 because it's not bad enough to stand out: I just wouldn't recommend it.

I extensively used Nikkor 50/1.4 Ai-s on my Olympus: gorgeous at mid - distance and ho-hum at long and infinity, warmish colour. 50/1.2 Ai-s has even better reputation.

No post-processing or editing, JPEG out of camera, cold cloudy day f2.0.

 

Edited October 28, 2018 by ruslan

I also liked Zeiss 50/1.4 ZF modern Planar made in 2010.

The Nikon 100mm 2.8 series

105/2.5 Ai is better but Zeiss 50/1.4 ZF modern Planar made in 2010 or Voigtlander 75/2.5 Heliar (charming one) are much better than Nikkor 105mm.

As a fairly recent MILC convert, I'm still fascinated by the ability to easily adapt almost any lens to my camera. I currently have 3 adapters - Nikon F mount, M42 and 39mm Leica thread - and a pile of old lenses gathering dust that I've been working through to see what they can do on the Sony a6000.

 

How about these for starters?

 

1. Flektogon 35mm f/2.4 - close focusing is really useful.

2. Meyer Optik Lydith 30mm f/3.5 (original) - sharp and artistic bokeh if provoked

3. Helios 44-3, 58mm f/2 - sharp stopped down, softish at wider apertures

4. Sonnar 135mm f/3.5 (m42 - useful close focusing)

5. Tele Takumar 200m f/5.6 preset

6. macro Takumar 50mm f/4 preset

7. Tokina AT-X 400mm f/5.6

 

These are all excellent on the Sony alpha 6000.

Konica Hexanon 40mm f/1.8 It was always a good lens on the Konica SLRs and is nice and sharp on the digital bodies too, small size means it doesn't look or feel unbalanced on a micro four thirds body. Currently my "two lens kit" is the Hexanon 40/1.8 and the 28/3.5.

Check out Phillip Reeve's site HERE

What's good for the A7 is generally good for the A6000 (I have both)

 

I started with older manual focus lenses years ago when I first got my NEX 6. These days the only ones I still use are the Micro-Nikkor 55mm f/2.8, Canon FD 400mm f/2.8 and Canon FD 50mm f/1.2. IOW, specialty lenses. I do have a few of my old Olympus Pen lenses that work well on APS-C and are super small/light. Most Nikkors work great. Most RF lenses I tried were so-so in a strict sense but show a lot of "character". It's hard to beat the modern Sigma 19mm, 30mm and 60mm lenses if top optical quality is what you're after. That's what I use mostly on my A6000 but older lenses can have a cool look. Experimentation is the way forward. I found a cool, uncoated four element Tessar that I adapted out of an old folder...cool!

I just got hold of an adapter from Mamiya 645 to Nikon F, and already had a Nikon-to-Sony adapter. So I've been trying my old M645 Sekor lenses out on digital bodies.

 

All the lenses I've tried have been very good, but most are too big and cumbersome for the tiny a6000 - more's the pity!

 

However, I was totally stunned by the quality of my 300mm f/5.6 Sekor. It's no bigger than a 300mm lens for a 35mm film camera, but shows none of the nasties you usually get with relatively cheap 300s. No fringing, no corner smudging - just crisp and perfect across the frame from wide open.

 

I see this lens as a real sleeper at the moment; priced well below what its optical quality should demand.

 

Another pleasant surprise was a 28 f/2 Kiron in Nikon fit. Centrally excellent at f/2, with acceptable edges and corners on APS-C. Probably a bit of a disaster on full-frame though, and quite heavy for general use.

Mir-1 37mm, I'd never really used this lens much on film bodies, it's a bit soft and I couldn't really get to grips with the 37mm focal length, I felt it couldn't decide if it wanted to be a wide or a normal, with the disadvantages of both, I always preferred the sharper, faster Hexanon 40mm.

 

But... on a micro 4/3 body, it's transformed into rather a nice portrait lens, f2.8 gives about the right depth of field for head and shoulders and the slight softness works in it's favour. Knock the saturation down to around 75% in post and the results are very pleasing. Certainly a nice alternative to the Jupiter-9 when there isn't enough space to use the longer lens and the f2.8 maximum apeture isn't a handicap when I'd need to stop the Jupiter or Helios down in order to get the desired depth of field anyway.

 

Impressed.

The lens performance vs sensor size equation can fool you sometimes. Conventional wisdom says the smaller sensor will carve out a lens' central sweet spot, presumably cropping away edge aberrations and doubling down on center performance. But I've found it varies all over the place: sometimes a particular optic performs way better on small sensors, but just as often worse. This is most noticeable with film-era wides in the 20mm range from Nikon, Canon, Zuiko: they're "meh" on APS-C or 4/3rds, but kinda nice on A7 or FX DSLR.

 

My current favorites on the A7II surprised me. I was never much of a 50mm lens fan with film, but keep stumbling on old 50s now that do marvelous things on digital. The Hexanon AR 50mm f/1.4 from my old Konica T3 has the best tones and colors this side of a Zeiss Milvus/Loxia at 10x the price: it replaced my 50mm f/1.4 SMC Takumar M42, which is also lovely. A few months ago I picked up a relatively uncommon early 7-element Nikkor-S 5cm f/2 with a beat up Nikkormat: this has delicate transitions in and out of the focus plane unlike any other Nikkor (almost a medium format look). Rounding out my current trio is a preset-diaphragm 58mm /2 Zeiss Jena Biotar- very old school Zeiss rendering, and the 12-blade aperture allows more exposure flexibility while retaining rounded bokeh. The Biotar pulled me away from my OM Zuiko 50/1.8 silver nose.

 

But my hands-down favorite right now is the Nikkor 35mm f/1.4 AIS: another surprise, as I never cared for it on film (preferring the 35/2). But several months ago, chulkim here on the forums convinced me to buy it again for digital, and I couldn't be happier with it. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer wide open: spherical aberration galore. But the aberrations are sort of unique to this lens: it draws on digital in a way I've never pulled off with any other lens (and at f/5.6 it can cut diamonds). Incredibly compact, the size is a great match for the A7II. If using the 35 instead of a 50, I'll usually pair it with the (again newish to me) older Sonnar-formula 105/2.5 Nikkor. I've had the later AI 105 lens for thirty years, but only got the original version a couple years ago. I like the old better than the new on A7II and D700, mostly for the focus plane transitions (which hew closer to, but not quite as amazing as the ancient 5cm f/2 Nikkor).

 

Oh yeah: rodeo_joe is spot on re the Mamiya 645 teles: nearly all variations from 200-300mm are killer on any sensor size, and very affordable.

 

Edited February 8, 2019 by orsetto

Here's another worthy of consideration.

 

Not a classic, nor adapted, but I think it fits in rather well with the other lenses here in terms of price, build and optical character.

 

7artisans 35mm f1.2, native APSc lens, Fuji or Sony mount.

 

I bought my example used, employing the same philosophy that I used to apply to Soviet lenses, that it's better to buy a used copy known to be good than to buy a new, unknown example.

 

I'm really impressed.

 

My (limited) understanding is that it's essentially a modern variation of the Sonnar, 35/1.2 being roughly comparable to a 50/1.7 on 35mm. So it's a nifty fifty.

 

Small size makes it a good match for an APSc camera like the Fuji X-T10 mine is on. Feels and operates like a classic manual lens.

 

I have no complaints about the image quality, it's not clinically modern, it has character.

 

My sample appears to be a particularly good one, it's soft wide open, but not excessively so and is very sharp across the frame stopped down to around f5.6. My lens cap stays in place with no problems.

 

f1.2 is very hand when you need it.

 

Only complaint is that I'd maybe prefer a click stop aperture.

Leica M-P 240

50mm Collapsible Summicron (a ~60 year old lens)

 

I had this lens up for sale until I took a series of pictures with it on my daily walk, after which I decided to keep it. It's not a perfect performer by any measure (it has been CLA'd, but still has mild haze and cleaning marks), but I really like its character.

1956 Collapsible Summicron 5 on Fuji X-P1