Advice Wanted RECOMMEND Maybe obscure lenses or otherwise good deals that you can adapt on mirrorless

mike3996

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My Panasonic S1 is not attracting any buyers so my backup plan is to keep it and buy new adapters for it. Getting the necessary motivation to do so, my question would be: what lenses could justify this expense?

I originally bought the S1 for Leica and Nikkor lenses but I found it's in part more fun to shoot the natively even if it's more difficult or whatever.

Recommend and possibly link here some lenses you'd perhaps get if you were in my shoes. :)
 
Good deals tend to be with mis described items, or bundles where the lenses have not been specifically listed.
There are very few photographic lenses that can't be adapted to typical mirrorless systems, with an S1 you probably want to avoid lenses designed for smaller formats (even though some of these will work well). I use around 15 different SLR/Rangefinder mounts on my A7ii and any of those should be OK for the S1 as well.
If your willing to put in a little more effort in adapting enlarger lenses & projector lenses can be fun - the enlarger ones tend to be particularly good for close-up/macro, while projectors have no aperture, but can be very fast for the money... (My 50mm/1.2 only cost £16 but it doesn't cover FF, starting to show vignetting on APSC)
For extreme macro microscope objectives can work really well but they don't work well for routine shooting.

My own best bargain is a Carl Zeiss Jena 35mm/2.4 Flektogon, well worth the £250 I've often seen it sell for (I got mine for £10, with a body & two other lenses...)

In general for legacy lenses I'd stick to primes (& avoid ultra wides), a good many of these can hold there own against modern lenses.
 
More fun to be had from primes. Off the top of my head:

M42 mounts:

Wide: Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 20mm F4
35mm: Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 35mm F2.4, Takumar 35, F2.3
50mm: Pentacon 50mm F1.8, Tessar 50mm F2.8, obviously the Takumar 50mm F1.4.
100mm: Meyer Optik Gorlitz Trioplan F2.8
Oh, and Pentacon 300mm F4 which I could have got for $40 but turned it down, it was just too big.

Zuiko OM Mount:

Pretty much all lenses from 50mm to 200mm

Canon FD Mount:

All 50s. Maybe the 200mm, F2.8?.

Point being, whilst you'll be already covered in most of the above focal lengths, the above primes will still give you something different and worthwhile.

A very dangerous place to be as this is merely the tip of the iceberg. I haven't mentioned the Nikkors which you already have, nor the Minoltas or Konica/ Minoltas/ Helios, it's never ending. Then there's Contax...and so on. Whatever you pay for the lenses will generally represent value but I always accept that whatever I've paid, there will always be 20 people that paid a fraction of what I did for the same lens; doesn't matter (the game is the game :LOL: ).
 
Had a Vivitar 85mm 1.8 Preset T once. Loaned it to a friend and it never made it back. Was pretty cool with it's many(14) blades. Rare but I think if you find one you'll like it - if an 85 is on your radar.
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Nikon 55/3.5 Micro. Since I shoot manual focus, AF (at the present) does not matter.
I think I paid $35 for mine.

500/8 mirror/reflex. With my Olympus, it is now a stabilized lens ;)
As long as you are not tracking a fast moving subject, the manual focus works just fine.
 
I believe all vintage lenses have their place in the rotation of experimentation. I played extensively in the Nikon pool of AI/AI-S and pre-AI manual focus lenses.

I won't say that some are "better" than others...as each has their own charm and allure.

Best I can do is share my reviews that I did on those adapted lenses and hope you get something of use from them.

20mm

28mm

35mm

55mm

85mm

105mm

135mm

180mm

200mm

300mm
 
I just checked, min to max is about 280+ degrees of rotation.
I don't consider that a "short focus throw."
Oh, right. My bad, I remembered poorly.

Meant to say that the focus throw dedicated to normal shooting distances (1m - infinity) is very short and was very difficult for me to focus using Nikon Df and its ERF dot.
 
Just came across this very interesting thread. My recommendation: the Minolta MD 2/50. It was mostly sold as a kit lens to the cheaper SLRs of the day. Even today this lens is quite cheap and often goes with a camera for little money. And it's a very good landscape lens: at f/8 it is sharp across the field and there is virtually no geometric distortion. Color and contrast are simply outstanding, vivid rendering.

S01-20150624-054.jpg
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Mc and md rokkor Minolta lenses are great. Just avoid the cheap Celtic versions. I took my 45mm f2 recently, it is maybe my least favorite in the near 50mm range and yet some of the images I got with it are fantastic.

Personally, I think !maybe the 58mm 1.4 is my favorite, but the 50 1.7 and 1.4 are technically maybe better
 
Mc and md rokkor Minolta lenses are great. Just avoid the cheap Celtic versions.
All Minolta Celtic lenses I had and have, are mechanically just as good as their Rokkor counterparts. Optical designs are the same, but coatings can be different, resulting in possibly increased sensitivity to flare and ghosting, and the resulting color rendering can be different from the equivalent Rokkors. Rokkor lenses were known at the time for their consistency in color rendering and contrast across the lens range, and this was achieved by what Minolta called Achromatic Coating. More background on this in David Kilpatrick's article.

I have a Minolta Celtic Macro 3.5/50, which is sharper than the MC Macro Rokkor I've had and sold, and color rendering is best described as golden, which I like a lot for certain pictures.
 
All Minolta Celtic lenses I had and have, are mechanically just as good as their Rokkor counterparts. Optical designs are the same, but coatings can be different, resulting in possibly increased sensitivity to flare and ghosting, and the resulting color rendering can be different from the equivalent Rokkors. Rokkor lenses were known at the time for their consistency in color rendering and contrast across the lens range, and this was achieved by what Minolta called Achromatic Coating. More background on this in David Kilpatrick's article.

I have a Minolta Celtic Macro 3.5/50, which is sharper than the MC Macro Rokkor I've had and sold, and color rendering is best described as golden, which I like a lot for certain pictures.
Maybe my copies were bad, but at least for me, they felt inferior mechanically as well. I still own one, but it's just because I don't want to bother with selling it. Never had a non Celtic one that I didn't like.

Per usual, ymmv
 
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