OT: lenses (Was: Front Panels - PDP8 and PDP 11

[Marco Gariboldi]

2016-03-10 16:59 GMT+01:00 Zane Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com>:

>
> > On Mar 9, 2016, at 11:37 PM, Paul Anderson <useddec at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Popular or Modern Photography 20 or 30 years ago had an article on the 10
> > best lens ever made. I think Zeiss made 3 of them, and they were the only
> > company with more than one.
>
> One of my all time favorite lenses is the Hasselblad 80mm f/2.8 Planar C
> lens made by Zeiss.  Even their low-end Tessar lenses are awesome.
>

Anything made for Hasselblad could hardly be called 'low-end'.  (A bit like
a 'low-end' SGI, there was basically never such a thing... certainly not in
terms of original cost.)

The only truly low-end Carl Zeiss optics are probably the *Pentacon*
series, made by the post-WW II Carl Zeiss Jena branch of the GDR.


Take a look at the Sony a7 series of bodies, people are using RTS lenses on
> them.  You can put almost anything on them, and they’re a full frame
> sensor.  I know that the wider lenses might have some fringing issues at
> the edges.


Which (affordable) lens *doesn't* have imperfect edges, especially
completely analog lenses without any in-camera digital correction.  (This
can also be done afterwards, if one knows the possible distortion values.)

The Sony a7-series aren't exactly cheap.  More affordable and rather good,
too, are µ4/3 cameras, especially in conjunction with a focal reducer, if
the crop is too much of an obstruction.  I gain an extra stop of light, on
top of reducing the crop, with my M42/Praktica thread mount lenses.  My
thorium-coated Asahi Pentax Super-Takumar 1.4/50's maximum diaphragm is
effectively widened to an impressive ƒ/1.  On top of that I have in-body
image stabilization, good high ISO handling and other features, all at the
fraction of the cost.  On top of that, I can exchange my lenses with my
dedicated µ4/3 Super 16 digital film camera.



> I’ve started looking seriously at the a7 series, as it would allow me to
> use a lot of lenses I have, that I can currently only use on 35mm film
> bodies.
>

Nothing prevents you from using a full frame lens on a smaller (e.g. APS-C)
sensor body.  The crop isn't always a negative, sometimes it can change a
mediocre tele-photo prime into an excellent one.



> Since I started shooting more than just Nikon, it’s a lot harder to find
> Nikon lenses I really like.  The only AF lens I really like is the Nikkor
> 50mm f/1.4G, at f/5.6 it can compete with my 50mm Summicron.
>

At ƒ/5.6 only?  Well, that's rough...

 - MG