Home»Miscellaneous»Vintage Lens Examination

Photos taken from a few old vintage lenses (a friend's Canon FDn 35/2.8, FDn 50/1.4, FDn 100/2.8 and my newly acquired Pentax SMC Takumar 50/1.4) with my EOS M body.

In practice, I found using these manual lenses to be a love-hate kinda thing. I love that they are small and compact (although not necessarily lightweight). The action of the focus rings are very smooth. They can be relatively cheap alternatives to their modern equivalents. And they just look and feel awesome!

On the other hand, I'm spoiled with all the conveniences with modern lens/camera interfaces - buttons and dials to quickly set aperture and shutter speed, not to mention push button auto-focus. For the lenses themselves, especially the wide fast primes, they have quite a bit of chromatic aberrations (green/purple fringing) in high contrast situations, they seem to have less color saturation and overall contrast isn't as punchy. I think this is mostly due to the lack of modern lens coatings, and that most older lenses are single coated, while newer lens elements are multi-coated to counteract these issues.

Admittedly, most of these 'flaws' can be fixed in post with Lightroom or Photoshop fairly easily. But that takes time. When editing this set of photos I found myself using more software tools and controls, or stronger use of the same controls to get the look I wanted.

The M lacks a viewfinder of any kind, which means manual focusing these lenses has to be done from the rear LCD. This isn't so bad indoors, but outdoors in bright light this can be very challenging. In either case, The M's 5x and 10x magnification feature helps to some degree, but you'll also have to contend with 5x and 10x the image shake if you're hand-holding the camera. In fact, manual focusing with the rear LCD outside in bright light was the main problem I had during this outing. Even confirming auto-focus with native M lenses is a pain when out in bright light - but the situation is made even more difficult when focusing manually (and with no image stabilization). I'm going to investigate alternatives for an actual viewfinder, such as the ClearViewer finder for outdoor use. Hopefully the next M model will have a nice high resolution electronic finder.

Overall, I enjoyed using these lenses and the images they produce can be very pleasing and beautiful - if you're willing to work a bit to help get them there.

Anyway, here are some photos from these lenses, some impromptu from around the house and from the Orlando Wetlands Park. Most of these are shot at the maximum aperture of the lens (a non-communicating adapter is needed to use these lenses on the M, which means the aperture setting isn't captured in the EXIF data - bummer!).