Manual Lenses: A Modern Approach?

[Travis Butler]

I’ve bought & sold several vintage lenses from/to www.keh.com

Highly recommended!

They’re good. I also like the used section at Robert’s Camera; they’re in Indianapolis, where a friend of mine lives, so I get to stop by when I visit.

 

[Travis Butler]

@bozaman - Despite my pouring of cold water on your enthusiasm for manual lenses, I confess that I do have a few old OM Zuiko examples and an OM to L converter. I’ve done some playing around and this is my analysis:

- Late 50mm f1.8 - actually very good. Acceptably sharp into the corners even wide open. Good contrast and colours. All it needs is AF to challenge my Panasonic 50mm f1.8 which is twice the size but performs beautifully!

- 24mm f2.8 - not sure of the age, but it's not a great performer. Centre of the frame is OK at f2.8, but the edges and corners are awful. By about f11 the sharpness across the frame is almost acceptable, but not quite.

- 100mm f2.8 - another late model, which I actually bought "new" in a closeout sale. It had been sat in its box unsold since the 1980s! And it's another great performer - quite the lens (not that I do any).

- 135mm f3.5 - just awful.

It's fun to play with these from time to time, but I'd never do anything serious with them!

Awww. ;_;

The 24mm had always been a favorite of mine, until this summer when I did a lot of aviation museum shooting with it and ran into a lot of flaring. Found another copy at a local sale, but it turned out to have a weird loose element problem; hold it in the wrong position and to goes out of focus, hold it straight out and tap it a couple of times and it goes back into focus.

I love the 100mm. The 50/1.8 gets a lot of love online; I’ve got three copies, including one of the late “Made in Japan”-labeled versions. It’s… fine, but never really excited me, which it shares with several other celebrated 50/1.7-1.8s (Pentax, Minolta for two). I prefer the OM 50/1.4.

I normally don’t use 135s very much, but I remember the 135/3.5 being pretty good. I’ll have to dig out my copy and try it; we’re supposed to get our first snow Monday, that might be a good opportunity.

And I do highly recommend the 50mm macros, both the 3.5 and f/2.

 

[GeorgeHudetz]

If you want something longer, take a look at the Rokinon/Samyang 135/F2. It will require an adapter, but it has excellent optics wide-open. It’s somewhat legendary in the astro community as a result. Not sure if it has good bokeh/rendering, however.

I’m considering getting one as it’s a great focal length for imaging Andromeda. Right now on the Rok website, the EF-mount version is heavily discounted to $339.