Are old 35mm Lenses worth buying for use on a DSLR?

gothgirl

gothgirl

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Are old 35mm Lenses worth buying for use on a DSLR?

I see a few crop up cheap and wonder if they're worth getting? Quality wise, what kind of images could they produce?

I've seen some damn good photos took on film, but will this translate to a DSLR?
 
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Hi, The answer to your question is "YES". I use them professionally quite a bit.
 
one cheaper one that i keep meaning to pick up is one of the Helios lenses (cant remember the exact one) , the bokeh I see it can produce is truly unique.
 
I think the Old Minolta MD /MC lenses are brilliant on both DSLR and Sony Nex with adaptors , the colours are Awesome and great contrast.

They can be had pretty cheap on ebay and would recommend the 35-70mm F3.5 constant Results are excellent.
 
One of my legacy lenses became liable to produce veiling flare in certain circumstances when used on a digital body. It hadn't produced this on film. I could only guess that the effect may have been due to the older coating type on its rear element ...
 
The answer is some, but with your system its a little more difficult as the older canon MF lenses are FD mount not eos mount and some early EOS AF lenses wont work properly with later bodies.

The other reason I said some is not all older lenses are good ones, there are some real lame ducks as well that are just not worth owning at all.
For instance in the long lens range
Sigma 400mm f5.6, most are soft including the APO version and it will depend whether or not the lens has been chipped as to whether it will autofocus on a digital body.
Sigma 170-500mm, slow at F6.3, weighs a ton, soft at anything over 350mm, suffers from terrible zoom creep and again may or may not work depending on whether or not its been chipped/how late a model it is.

You can get an adaptor and use various MF lenses with the body but in order to use FD lenses the adaptor needs optics in it, this means most are just not worth bothering with as the adaptors sold aren't that good a optical quality.
M42 lenses will work fine with an adaptor as will some older nikon lenses but most of the good older nikon lenses fetch nearly as much as a new budget version these days.
 
I would only be looking at EOS lenses, off old EOS film cameras :)

For what I can pick them up for, I think its worth a shot :)
 
droj said:
One of my legacy lenses became liable to produce veiling flare in certain circumstances when used on a digital body. It hadn't produced this on film. I could only guess that the effect may have been due to the older coating type on its rear element ...
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it can be that the sensor is more reflective than film too, plus we shoot more and look at the pics bigger
 
Just like some lenses now there are some very good old lenses and some poor ones.

However, many are very cheap and if you can manage the manual focus and possibly manual aperture they can be a good buy.

These two were taken with a 70 - 210mm Sigma zoom lens I bought about 30 years ago.






Dave
 
You can use Olympus, Nikon, Contax/Yashica, M42, Pentax K, Leica R, Adaptall/Adaptall-2 and even Exakta lenses on your 350D. The better lenses are usually the OEM models from the big brands e.g. Nikkor and the Contax Carl Zeiss series.

The Helios 44 (all its varients) are great fun as they produce swirly bokeh and are reasonably fast at f/2. Plus they can be had for a tenner plus an adapter which will cost a fiver :)
 
gothgirl said:
I would only be looking at EOS lenses, off old EOS film cameras :)

For what I can pick them up for, I think its worth a shot :)
Click to expand...

If they are Canon lenses, they are definitely worth it.

It is pot luck with the older Sigma gear - some are ok, many are not. And many will not control aperture properly either, instead just erroring if you try to use them anything less than wide open.

Cosina/tamron. Tend to work OK.
 
manualfocus-g said:
The Helios 44 (all its varients) are great fun as they produce swirly bokeh and are reasonably fast at f/2. Plus they can be had for a tenner plus an adapter which will cost a fiver :)
Click to expand...

Just did a google image search for helios 44, that is some funky bokeh. :eek:
 
Tringa said:
Just like some lenses now there are some very good old lenses and some poor ones.

However, many are very cheap and if you can manage the manual focus and possibly manual aperture they can be a good buy.

These two were taken with a 70 - 210mm Sigma zoom lens I bought about 30 years ago.






Dave
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dave would that sigma not autofocus on my 350d???

I've seen one I want to buy....
 
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you might get af confirm chip, which will light up the screen when its in focus... But I'm guessing at 30 years old its a manual lens
 
I've found early EOS lenses are OK but as has been said the Sigma ones are best avoided - they often sell very cheap.

I have a large collection of 70s FD lenses which I sometimes use on my 450D with an adapter. The results can be surprisingly good if you stop down a little and get the manual focus spot on.

This one was taken with a 135f3.5 lens which is quite a basic lens, the adapter acts as a teleconverter of sorts too so you have a narrower field of view. At the time this was the longest lens I had, I would have never have got this shot at 50 mm!

7099238407_a8ac2a88b1_c_d.jpg
 
No Gothgirl, the lens I used to take the waxwings and puffin is manual focus.

Manual focus on a DSLR is more difficult than it was in the days of film SLRs with split screen focussing, but certainly far from impossible with a bit of practice.

As this is an 'A' lens (denoted by an 'A' on the aperture ring after the smallest f stop number) and therefore the aperture setting on the lens is passed to the camera, so apart from the focussing it works just like any modern lens.

Many old lenses are non-'A' so no information about the aperture is passed to the camera and many (if not all) normally work at full aperture, though with Pentax at least there is a workaround and I guess it would be the same for other makes.

Given that many of the old lenses are cheap I reckon they are worth a go.

Dave
 
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