The ultimate guide to Vintage Glass

The ultimate guide to Vintage Glass

As requested, a guide on vintage glass. I would say I’m one of the more knowledgable ones when it comes to the old stuff on NS and sharing is always a good thing, so here goes. I’ve divided the guide in a couple of sections.

- 1 – Vintage glass, why?

While some of you may be familiar with vintage glass, some of you may not. Either way, old glass is something you should be glad to know something about. First, let’s address what vintage glass even is. Commonly, vintage glass is a reference to a group of lenses that are older, from the MF (manual focus) era.
While there’s an increasing interest by a group of people to adapt their old lenses to their modern digital camera’s, a lot of shooters don’t even know this is possible (and thankfully so).
Let me point out the many advantages vintage glass has over modern day AF (auto focus) lenses.
- Price: because most people nowadays rely on autofocus for getting their stuff in focus, people dump their old lenses for very low prices, simply because the demand is much lower. Both the high supply and low demand as well as the much simpeler technologies used in the lenses, they are relatively much, much cheaper.
- Optical quality: You would say technology changed a lot in the last decennia (and I fully agree) but when it comes to technologies in the making of glass, very, very little has changed. While it’s far from acurate to say all vintage lenses have very good optical quality, a lot of the higher-end lenses are just as amazing as todays higher-end lenses: the only difference being that older high-end lenses are reasonably priced. Some lenses from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s have little air bubbles in them, this isn’t a sign of bad glass: quite the contrary actually. These air bubbles indicate the use of high end glass: the hotter the glass is when molded, the better the optical quality, but also the more air bubbles there are. These bubbles don’t affect the optical quality.
- Build quality: untill the 80’s, plastic wasn’t a common material to be used in every day use. Our generation grew up with everything made of plastic, but untill the 80’s, plastic was rarely used, let alone in the making of housings for lenses. Pretty much every lens produced before around 1985 is made with metal. Lenses made before 1975 are mostly 100% metal. Especially Soviet-made lenses are build like tanks and can be dropped with no consequences. Nowadays lenses feel like toys compared to most vintage glass
- Focus: Especially for video, there’s absolutely no reason to buy contemporary glass instead of the older stuff, as AF during video doens’t work anyway (and if it does, it blows). The focus with older lenses is incredibly much better compared to that of modern lenses. The focus ring is bigger, much smoother and the focus throw (the amount of degrees the lenses has to be turned from MFD (minimum focusing distance) to infinity is much bigger (resulting in being able to make much finer adjustments). While you may think MF’ing is hard with a modern lens, with older lenses, it’s much, much easier, simply because everybody had to manually focus.
- The aperture of all vintage glass is set on the lens, not in camera. I find this a very big advantage. I like setting the aperture on the lens itself much better than doing it through a button/setting/menu on your camera. It’s much faster. The disadvantage to this is that when shooting stopped down (at higher f-stops) the viewfinder darkens significantly. You can compose your image first and then stop down. On your LCD it shouldn’t darken (your camera compensates for it).
- The price of most vintage glass is rising. While a year or 5 back EVERYBODY made the the change from analog to digital (resulting in RIDICULOUSLY low prices, even for amazing Leica and Zeiss glass), a lot of people are going ‘back to their roots’ by shooting film or are adapting their old lenses to their digital camera’s, resulting in an increase in price in most lenses. Vintage glass I’ve had for a longer period of time are most of the time worth more now than they were when I bought them. Good investment (unlike modern glass).

Ok, by now you should know more or less why you would want to shoot vintage glass. There’s a shit ton of advantages and basically two disadvantages: you have to manually focus and there is barely any good older zooms out there. I’ll eleborate the latter a bit further:
The first zoom lens dates from the late 50’s (I think) but it was complete shit, like all zoom lenses were till somewhere in the 80’s. While primes of the 60’s are no worse than of today, zoom lenses have seen a tremendous amount of optical increase in the past decennia. Not untill the 80’s was there any zoom lens that was worth getting or that came anywhere near the optical quality of primes. Personally I love shooting primes, but if you want a zoom lens, there’s not a whole many that can compete with newer, AF lenses (while there are some that trump any AF zoom in terms of IQ (image quality), think of the Zeiss 35-70.

Now that you’re up to date as far as vintage glass goes, let’s see how you can adapt them to your digital camera.


- 2 – Which brands and mounts can be adapted to my camera?

Most brands have their own mount to attach a lens to a camera, while some used mounts by other manufacturers or made lenses for camera’s not made by the company. Older camera’s used a screw mount that used a thread to screw a lens onto a camera. Later on, the bayonet replaced the more common screw mounts, because they were easier to use, as well as more secure.
Now, the factor that determines whether a lens can be used on your digital camera or not, is the flange to film distance (FFD). This is the distance from the rear element of your lens, to where your sensor (or film) is. If the distance for your camera is bigger than that of the lens you want to adapt, you won’t be able to, because the mirror will hit the rear element of the lens. Even though the FFD might on paper be big enough, a lot of the older lenses have a rear element that portrudes a little into the camera when focused at infinity. Sometimes, this prevents the mirror in your SLR to move up, because it hits the rear element of camera, thus preventing from taking an image. This is one of the reasons why you won’t be able to adapt vintage glass (or you can adapt it, but can’t focus to infinity, resulting in you being able to use only ‘half’ of your lens).
In the case of Canon, because the fullframe camera’s have a bigger mirror than crop camera’s (while they have the same FFD) some lenses can only be adapted to croppers, while the FF camera’s won’t have mirror clearance.
You can buy an optical adapter to prevent the mirror from hitting and allowing you to use lenses with a shorter FFD with camera’s with a bigger FFD, but those adapters GREATLY decrease the optical quality of your lenses, not making it worth it to do so.

There’s a very nice wikipedia site that has listed all the flange distances, check it out here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flange_focal_distance

Easily put: any lens where the register distance to it’s designated camera is bigger than that of your current camera, you should should be able to adapt it. You have to take into account the size of the adapter ring though.

Canon has a register distance of 44mm, Nikon of 46.5mm. That’s the reason why you can adapt Nikon to Canon, but not the other way around.

The following mounts can be adapted with an adapter ring to Canon:
- Nikon (F-mount)
- Pentax (K-mount)
- Praktica (M42 (screw mount))
- Olympus (OM-mount)
- Contax/Yashica (C/Y-mount)
- Tamron (T/T2 – screwmount. Similar, but not the same as M42!)

There are others, but these are by far most common!

The following mounts can be adapted with an adapter ring to Nikon:
- Tamron (T/T2 – screwmount. Similar, but not the same as M42!)
- Leica (R-mount. Not to be confused with M-mount. You can’t adapt M!)
- Nikon (F-mount)

As you can see, you can adapt a lot of lenses to Canon, while you only adapt to two to Nikon. The great thing about Nikon is though, that Nikon has never changed it’s mount, allowing you to shoot with any Nikon glass that was ever made for a Nikon SLR, whereas Canon chaned their SLR mount two times (first from FL to FD, then from FD to EF), allowing you only to use Canon glass from 1986 or later.
While Minolta/Sony uses an FFD of 44.5 (0.5mm bigger than Canon) it can’t be adapted because of issues with mirror clearance. Most Minolta (Rokkor) lenses can be converted to the EF mount though (changing the mount, not adapting it).

I've never adapted vintage glass to a mirrorless cam before, but because of the mirror and super short FFD, any lens that was made for an SLR can be adapted to mirrorless cams. It's a great thing. I won't go to deeply into this, as there's not a whole lot to say about it except for the above.