The Vintage Lens Panopticon

This time my review is a bit accidental, did not plan this purchase that was rather the outcome of a momentary mood while being on a sea camping vacation at the Bulgarian part of the Black Sea. While browsing carelessly through the online Facebook shops, my eye was caught by […]

This time something reatively rare comes on my lenses collection list. Been a while since I am considering adding a moderate telephoto lenses to my collection of M42 mount lenses, following one of my top favs – the Carl-Zeiss Pancolar 50mm f1.8 in zebra edition, then the Tessar 50mm f2.8 […]

Geeks have their fads. The Apple i-Cult. The Thinkpad cult among the laptop crowd. The Lomo hipster addicts. I am afraid Carl-Zeiss zebra acolytes also form a community I am gradually being sucked into. The Tessar 50mm f2.8 obviously allured me to the Carl-Zeiss obsession, so jumping into the first […]

This weekend of travelling has been marked by my tests of a GDR (German Democratic Republic) vintage lenses on my Pentax K-5 DSLR. The generous Mikołaj Podlaszewski has been so good to me to send me as a gift a film camera, the Praktica MTL 50, coupled by two sets […]

Finally managed to get my hand on one of these. For a lens unit of its characteristics, they are absurdly cheap these days. Curiosity that drives me, is whether it would be able to beat my all-times fav, the SMC 50mm f1.7, which for my taste and preferences beats all […]

This time I am after something classy: the Carl-Zeiss Tessar 50mm f2.8. One of the oldest ones as a construction, the 4 lenses design has been invented in the first decade of the 20th century, and since has remained as one of the most popular types of glasses. It is […]

One of the sharpest manual lenses ever came into my hands. Very small, typically for a Pentax gem, in production somewhere from late 1970s to 1984. Such a convenient focus length: on a 1.5 crop equals 50mm focus length, that is, a normal one. Very long focus throw – which […]

A walk with my all time favourite, ever: the Pentax SMC-M 50mm f1.7, produced from the late 70s till 1984. Smooth, long focus throw, a lot of light, dead sharp, and almost as small as a pancake lens, as solid as a rock. Good for almost anything, I use it […]

This time my sentiment calls me to a walk around with the Soviet pancake lens: the Industar 50-2 50mm f3.5 with the M42 mount. It was the standard prime lenses often offered with the Zenit M42 SLRs of the Soviet age, together with the Helios primes, and recently has gone […]

I rarely use zooms, and long focus lenses; my preferences go from ultra wide to normal primes. The Pentax SMC 75-150mm f4 is a remarkable exception that I prefer to keep in my collection when I need something longer. One of the best vario lenses I’ve come upon, it keeps […]