Vintage lenses - good quality?

I have a suitcase full of vintage lenses. I want to put them on DSLR bodies. However, I don't want to adapt them just to be "doing it," rather if, and only if, the quality will be as good as my EF lenses. I have mostly L glass, zoom and fixed.

The vintage lenses mostly went on Pentax bodies - Pentax ME, MX, and ME Super. The lenses are (from memory) Asahi Pentax, Vivitar and Takumar. They are all in very good to excellent shape.

I understand about auto / manual functionality.

My question is only about quality. Will they produce images as good as L glass or is it just not worth the time?

It fully depends on the lens. Lots of vintage lenses have optics which will absolutely hold up well to some of the best modern lenses, it depends on which lens and which version of said lens. I shoot almost exclusively with vintage lenses and most of the ones I use regularly easily matched or outperformed my 24-105L.

I would take them out and look up the one's you're interested in and see what others have said about them. There's no blanket answer for are they worth it, we don't know what you have

list the lens specs and folk will be in a better position to advise you.

Generally no. They don't generally can handle flares too well. Corners are usually not as sharp until you are shooting at F5.6 to F11. Also, not many of them can resolve well with high megapixel count sensors. They would generally perform well under 12mp. Anything beyond that, all of the lens weaknesses would get worst. Even more so when shooting wide open. Few of them are generally good enough for today's DSLRs.

TooManyShots wrote in post #17377394
Generally no. They don't generally can handle flares too well. Corners are usually not as sharp until you are shooting at F5.6 to F11. Also, not many of them can resolve well with high megapixel count sensors. They would generally perform well under 12mp. Anything beyond that, all of the lens weaknesses would get worst. Even more so when shooting wide open. Few of them are generally good enough for today's DSLRs.

I don't know about all that, there are lots of vintage lenses which perform excellently even wide open and often as good or better than modern lenses, even with high MP sensors.

Here's a shot wide open from a $25 Yashica ML 50mm f2 on the 36.3mp a7R

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/qgDr​qk

There are some vintage lenses that are of very high quality and others worth seeking out if you really appreciate nice bokeh. Some lenses (the Helios 44-2 comes to mind) can create 'swirling' bokeh. Some vintage lenses have an absolutely outstanding smooth, creamy like bokeh. I am not sure if the theory is correct but vintage apertures were constructed using more blades than modern lenses. This made the aperture more smooth and circular thus creating smooth, circular bokeh. I used to have a dozen or so vintage lenses that I mounted on the 5D via an adapter. Lots of great bokeh but I found focusing difficult. That would probably be much easier now with live view, focus peaking and such. I found the vintage lenses sometimes gave a less contrasty image often with poor colours but PP fixed that up well.

nqjudo wrote in post #17377540
There are some vintage lenses that are of very high quality and others worth seeking out if you really appreciate nice bokeh. Some lenses (the Helios 44-2 comes to mind) can create 'swirling' bokeh. Some vintage lenses have an absolutely outstanding smooth, creamy like bokeh. I am not sure if the theory is correct but vintage apertures were constructed using more blades than modern lenses. This made the aperture more smooth and circular thus creating smooth, circular bokeh. I used to have a dozen or so vintage lenses that I mounted on the 5D via an adapter. Lots of great bokeh but I found focusing difficult. That would probably be much easier now with live view, focus peaking and such. I found the vintage lenses sometimes gave a less contrasty image often with poor colours but PP fixed that up well.

It really depends on what you get, the extra blades aren't what caused the swirly bokeh though, that was a result of the shape of the elements used I believe. For instance, even my Helios 44-4 which only has 6 aperture blades shares the same swirly bokeh characteristics of the earlier 44-2.

As for the contrast, I actually prefer lower contrast lenses since they give you more to work with in post production than a higher contrast lens does, but most of my vintage lenses are just as high contrast as a modern equivalent and I often prefer the colors from them as well... as I said earlier, the vintage matters far less than the lens itself, there are fantastic lenses from the 40's, 60's, 80's, 2010's and everywhere in-between, it's just a matter of what you get The biggest improvements have come from he coatings, more modern lenses (90's onward) definitely are less prone to flaring, but in my experience that's the biggest difference if we're talking prime lenses. Modern zooms in my experience are significantly better than vintage ones though for the most part.

And focusing can be done easily with a DSLR if you get a precision manual focusing screen. I had the EG-S screen in my 6D and focusing with it was just as easy if not easier than focusing via focus peaking with my a7R I actually miss my OVF a little bit for MF, but I think that's mostly because I'm still not used to using an EVF.

EverydayGetaway wrote in post #17377500
I don't know about all that, there are lots of vintage lenses which perform excellently even wide open and often as good or better than modern lenses, even with high MP sensors.

Here's a shot wide open from a $25 Yashica ML 50mm f2 on the 36.3mp a7R

IMAGE LINK: https://flic.kr/p/qgDr​qk DSC01337.jpg by EverydayGetaway, on Flickr

Doesn't look at all "soft" to my eyes...

You need to shoot more with other vintage lenses. Not all of them are the same. Some are highly regarded even shooting with a DSLR body. Others are horrible even back in the film days. If the lens performs poorly even on a film body, it would suck on a digital sensor.

TooManyShots wrote in post #17377734
You need to shoot more with other vintage lenses. Not all of them are the same. Some are highly regarded even shooting with a DSLR body. Others are horrible even back in the film days. If the lens performs poorly even on a film body, it would suck on a digital sensor.

Isn't that pretty much exactly what I said...?

EverydayGetaway wrote in post #17377138
It fully depends on the lens. Lots of vintage lenses have optics which will absolutely hold up well to some of the best modern lenses, it depends on which lens and which version of said lens. I shoot almost exclusively with vintage lenses and most of the ones I use regularly easily matched or outperformed my 24-105L.

I would take them out and look up the one's you're interested in and see what others have said about them. There's no blanket answer for are they worth it, we don't know what you have

EverydayGetaway wrote in post #17377558
It really depends on what you get, the extra blades aren't what caused the swirly bokeh though, that was a result of the shape of the elements used I believe. For instance, even my Helios 44-4 which only has 6 aperture blades shares the same swirly bokeh characteristics of the earlier 44-2.

That is correct. My comments about swirly bokeh were not in the same context as the aperture blades. I mentioned the aperture blades only in the context of the creamy bokeh. Interestingly the swirly bokeh was apparently caused by a defect in some lenses.

nqjudo wrote in post #17377769
That is correct. My comments about swirly bokeh were not in the same context as the aperture blades. I mentioned the aperture blades only in the context of the creamy bokeh. Interestingly the swirly bokeh was apparently caused by a defect in some lenses.

The aperture blades only effect the bokeh when the lens is stopped down though, in which case the extra blades can certainly help.

EverydayGetaway wrote in post #17377738
Isn't that pretty much exactly what I said...?

You said a lot of them would do well shooting on a DSLR. I said only few and only the highly regarded ones. Like the Nikon 28mm f2.8 AIS, about $250. Or the Tamron sp (adaptall 2) 90mm f2.5 macro, which I have and ridiculously sharp at wide open even on my D7000, 16mp body. On the other hand, I also have the Vivitar 28mm f2.8 close focus lens for Nikon. At wide open, it is reasonably sharp on a D300, a 12mp body. On my D7000, is kind of soft with a bit of CA.

TooManyShots wrote in post #17377852
You said a lot of them would do well shooting on a DSLR. I said only few and only the highly regarded ones. Like the Nikon 28mm f2.8 AIS, about $250. Or the Tamron sp (adaptall 2) 90mm f2.5 macro, which I have and ridiculously sharp at wide open even on my D7000, 16mp body. On the other hand, I also have the Vivitar 28mm f2.8 close focus lens for Nikon. At wide open, it is reasonably sharp on a D300, a 12mp body. On my D7000, is kind of soft with a bit of CA.

I think saying "only a few" is seriously under-selling vintage lenses. There are tons of great quality lenses, some far more known than others. Like I said above, that Yashica ML 50/2 was only $25 and they often sell cheaper than that, it's also probably the least sharp of all the ML 50mm's I own (I have all but the f1.9). Pretty much all the vintage glass I own performs very respectably on the a7R and I don't really have any super well known or expensive lenses other than my Vivitar Series 1 lenses (28/1.9 and 70-210/2.8-4).

I have some hunderts of manual lenses, some perform well on DSLR, some not.

For example I use/have used Canon nFD 28/2.8, nFD50/1.8, nFD 85/1.2L, nFD 100/4 Macro, nFD300/2.8L, nFD400/2.8L, nFD500/4.5L which are good lenses on digital - the 400 the worst of the bunch. With the Canon nFd 24/1.4L and FD800/5.6 SSC I am not that happy - on the 24/1.4 I have to control my mount conversion for tilt.
My Zeiss Contax 35/1.4 and 85/1.4 performing very well, other Zeiss Contax lenses too. My Minolta Rokkor 58mm f/1.2 is good - modern lenses with aspherical elements are sharper, but have sometimes onion ring bokeh - for me not acceptable.
But also cheap lenses like a old Steinheil Quinar 135/2.8 and other 135/2.8 lenses, Olympus 28/2.8, Sigma Mini Wide 24/2.8, Nikon 200/4.0 perform well.

A MTF comparison off old FD SSC lenses (older than the newFD nFD lenses) and current Canon EF lenses like the 85/1.2 IIL showed that there is no significant different in optical performance between them: http://web.archive.org …optics/optics/p​age61.html
A hobby astronomer told me that some people prefer old manual lenses because of better image quality for astrophotography, don´t know comparison images for this.

Thank you very much for your responses. All were very helpful. The cameras they will be mounted on is a 5D2 (normal) and a 5D (IR converted).

Generally this is what I got and will do:

- Don't know if it's true or not, but back in the day I was told the asahi-pentax optics were good so I'll consider them.
- The Vivitar lenses were bargain lenses then, so I think I'll pass on them.
- I thought the takumar was said to be good, so I'll consider that.
- I'll disregard all zooms and focus on primes.