DiscussionAdapted vintage glass on mirrorless: share your weirdest combo

Thought we could do with a proper thread for this now the place is filling up. What's the oddest bit of old glass you've got on a modern body, and does it actually get used or is it a shelf ornament?

I'll start. Helios 44-2 on the A7 III via a £12 M42 adapter. Everybody has one, I know, and the swirl gets old if you lean on it... but stopped down to f/4 it's a perfectly decent 58mm and the flare is lovely when the sun's low. The Takumar 50 1.4 lives on there most weekends. Also an FD 50 1.8 that cost me a fiver at a car boot near Aylsham, which is sharper than it has any right to be.

Weirdest one I've tried was a Jupiter-9 85mm I borrowed off a mate. Focus throw like turning a ship's wheel. Gave it back.

Go on then. Ones that cost under £50 count double. Just saying

tomthurlow said:

Weirdest one I've tried was a Jupiter-9 85mm I borrowed off a mate.

Ha, that's nothing. Had a Mamiya Sekor 80 1.9 off an old M645 on the A7R for about a month lol. Honestly hilarious, its the size of a tin of beans and focusing it wide open on a person who is breathing is basically impossible. Sold it on because I kept reaching for the Sigma 35 anyway. I'm supposed to be done buying lenses so I'm only allowed to talk about past ones in this thread

I'm the odd one out here because my Takumar lives on the Spotmatic, which is where it was always meant to live... but I'll tell you a thing. Mine has gone the colour of weak tea. My dad swore it was 'the radium' and wouldn't let it sit on the mantelpiece. It's thorium, apparently, which is either better or worse depending who you ask. Does anybody actually know if it's safe to keep in a bag next to your sandwiches? Asking for my sandwiches.

pinholepete said:

Mine has gone the colour of weak tea.

Sunny windowsill for a week with the caps off, or one of those UV nail lamps if you can borrow one. Cleared mine right up. Mind you, on digital you just white balance it out and nobody's any the wiser.

Sandwiches are fine. Probably.

tomthurlow said:

does it actually get used or is it a shelf ornament?

Nothing weird here. I've got a shoebox of my dad's old AI Nikkors that I keep meaning to put on the Zf with a cheap adapter. The Zf looks right with them, which is half the point of the camera if I'm honest. It's on the list... cheers

Did the vintage thing on Fuji for a year. Bought six lenses, used two, sold the lot for roughly what I paid. Fun, but I take more pictures with autofocus. The two I kept the longest were a Pentax 50 and a little Olympus 28, and even those ended up in a drawer once I had the 33.

my FM2 lenses are the vintage glass lol. theyre just on the camera they were made for

although I did try the 50 1.8 on a friends X-T4 once and it made a lovely little 75mm, surprisingly. didnt expect to like it

tomthurlow said:

Helios 44-2 on the A7 III via a £12 M42 adapter

dont see the point tbh. AI-S stuff goes straight on the D750 and meters fine, no adapters, no faff, no focus peaking. best camera Nikon ever made and this is one of the reasons

tomthurlow said:

the Takumar 50 1.4 lives on there most weekends

Adapted, sure. But a 50 on a digital sensor through a little TV screen isn't the same thing as looking through an FE2 with a roll of Kodachrome loaded. Some of us were there. The lens was half of it, the film was the other half.

Put my dads old Minolta Rokkor 58 1.4 on the a6700 last summer and reckon it's one of the nicest portrait lenses I've ever used, about 87mm equiv. Foucsing at 1.4 on a moving toddler is a different story lol, my nephew now has heaps of photos where his ear is sharp and nothing else is

ellie_v said:

Minolta Rokkor 58 1.4

Now that's a cracking lens. Underrated because it's not on the YouTube list of 'five vintage lenses you need'... which is exactly why they're still cheap. Keep it quiet.

tomthurlow said:

the swirl gets old if you lean on it

It gets old in about a day. M glass on an M10 isn't adapting, it's just using a camera. Everyone putting Helios lenses on Sonys for swirly backgrounds is going through a phase. The phase ends when they try to zone focus it.

One technical thing people miss with this hobby, especially with wides. Most mirrorless sensors have a fairly thick filter stack in front of them (IR cut, UV, low-pass on some bodies, the cover glass). Lenses designed for film, particularly symmetrical rangefinder wide-angles with the rear element sitting close to the film plane, send light into the corners at steep angles, and that stack refracts it. The result is smeared corners, colour shifts toward magenta or cyan at the edges, and vignetting that doesn't clean up with a normal profile.

It's not the lens being bad and it's not the adapter. It's the mismatch. A 35mm or longer SLR lens is usually fine because SLR designs had to clear a mirror, so the exit pupil is further away. Leica's own bodies use a thinner stack for exactly this reason.

So if you've put an old 21 or 28 on a Sony and decided it's rubbish, try it on a body with a thinner stack before you sell it. Or just use it as a 'look' and stop pixel-peeping the corners, which is the more honest option for most of what gets posted in threads like this.

rawtherapist said:

Most mirrorless sensors have a fairly thick filter stack in front of them

this explains so much. had an old 28 that looked like someone had smeared vaseline round the edges on the A7R and I thought Id just bought a dud. Sold it for a loss to a bloke with an M6 who said it was perfect on his. Now I know why. Honestly the most expensive lesson in optics Ive had, and Ive had a few

Tried a Helios on the A7C II for a week. Swirl's fun for about four days. Then I put the 50 GM back on and remembered what wide open is supposed to look like.

f2point8 said:

remembered what wide open is supposed to look like

Clinical, you mean... nobody ever looked at a portrait of their nan and said 'lovely MTF'. Just saying

tomthurlow said:

nobody ever looked at a portrait of their nan and said 'lovely MTF'

I do. Every time.

Grand thread. I've an old Pen F half-frame 38mm on the GX9, makes a 76mm equiv and it's a tiny little thing, sound for portraits. Cost me 30 quid at a market in Cork and the fella threw in a lens cap that doesn't fit anything I own

the FD 50 1.8 is the only lens I own lol. it's on the AE-1, not digital, but I keep reading threads like this and getting ideas. which adapter do people use for FD to anything? the ones with glass in them or without