Misconceptions of Vintage

[Ian Grant]

I've only just spotted this thread.

It's a shame you felt the need to go off and try and gain support for your definition of vintage.

Every definition I've ever seen of 'vintage' wrt photography puts the cut-off point somewhere in the 90s - pre digital. Stricter definitions put the cut-off in the 80s, pre AF. I don't think any of them claim an 85 year-old camera is modern.

I'd love to see some links to verify where this 'consensus' comes from. It seems like the only misconception is from you.

Here's some links which back up what most other people believe.

Here's what Adobe says:



When it comes to antiques, vintage is generally accepted as anything more than 22 years old, but less than 100.

Here's what House Beautiful says about vintage furniture for example.



When it comes to clothing Vogue have this to say



Lastly here's what ChatGPT came back with:



Every 'vintage lens' I own and was using in the other thread is Manual Focus and pre-1983.

It's semantics, I remember a photographer coming to visit, I'd refurbished her TP (Thornton Pickard) shutter and made a board for one of her lenses. She asked if I had a lens she could buy with a vintage look, I said look at the images on the wall which is a vintage lens, she went straight for an image of Sagrade Familia, OK a late 1960s lens on a Yashicamat 124, but I'd used differential focus, focussing on a tree in front of the cathedral while having an ice-cream, making the cranes far less obvious.

She had passed over the images made with a 1940/1 12" Dagor, and an early 1950s CZJ 150mm Tessar, now this is where we need clarity, what really was the vintage look, she wanted. Sheleft with an uncoated Agfa 135mm f4.5 Solinar, a Tessar clone

While we may differ on what is vintage, the images you are posting using 1970s - early 80s lenses just reflect my experiences o how good the major camera manufacturers lenses had become, and also high-end 3rd party lenses like Vivitar S1 & Tamron SP. Other cheaper 3rd party lenses particularly wide angle lens were not so good, often with barrel and other distortions.

I come from a different direction, I've used 35mm SLR cameras since about 1969, then MF, and finally graduating to large Format around 1977, I always wanted the best multi Coated lenses I could afford, but slowly acquired older LF lenses as well and realised the earlier coatings were excellent.

The term Multi Coatin came into use with the SMC -Super Multi Coated Takumar lenses were release using new coating technologies developed by Pentax in conjunction with Carl Zeiss. Zeiss themselves Patented 2 layer coatings in 1941, and by the early 1960s many lenses were using a number of coatings layers to optimise them for colour balance, examples are the Super Takumar, Color Skopar, and even the early CZJ 50I guemm f2 Pancolar, which is essentially a Flekton with the newer coatings.

And then I've been restoring wood and brass cameras, also early LF SLRs, etc for the past 20 years, and many pre WWI lenses, some from the 1860s.

I guess I find the term vintage problematic because it is to all encompassing. @Kell you are clearly showing and proving that older manual focus lenses from the 70s and early 80s are capable of matching modern AF lenses when used on Digital cameras.

We would all differ slightly on what is a vintage look with lenses. James Ravilious used uncoated pre-WW2 Leitz lenses, because he preferred the look they gave compared to post WW2 coated Leitz lenses. He had longer lens hoods custom-made to help improve contrast, and cut down flare.

I used an uncoated CZJ 135mm f4.5 Tessar for a short time, I found prints made of the negatives just had a different look to my Multi Coated lenses, which I didn't like. I picked up a CZJ 150mmm f4.5 T (coated) lens, the difference was substantial, better micro-contrast, improved shadow and highlight details, prints made with it match those of MC lenses.

Ian