Vintage lens for video

H

HeyAndy

Active member
What do you think about using vintage lenses for video/filmmaking work? Are vintage lenses more desirable to use for filmmaking than contemporary photography lenses?
 
Most of my lenses are vintage Leitz for the Leica-R mount, from the 60s and 70s. They are just as good as modern glass... as long as you spend at least four times as much in said modern glass.
Other vintage lenses... not so good, unless you want their very particular "personality" on your image.

And in any case: vintage glass is a lottery. Some of my best lenses came to me badly assembled and with serious image quality issues.

Loads of tests here and here. And videos shots with them here.
 
I am a big fan of vintage lenses for video. My main kit, for an FS-100, is mostly made up of vintage glass. I have a set of manual Nikon Primes, 20mm, 24mm, 35mm, several 50mm and a 100mm. I also have two vintage Vivitar Series 1 zooms, my favorite "Go to" lens, a Vivitar Series 1 28 - 105mm F2.8-3.5 zoom and I have one of the iconic Vivitar Series 1 70 -210mm. Buying used glass can be risky, but I mostly have bought off of eBay, and have great luck getting lenses in very good shape. Stick with sellers with good feedback scores (on multiple items) and you should be fine.
 
For the record, I've bought vintage lenses from both big sellers with great reputation and small sellers with no good or bad reputation to speak of. I don't think the difference in lemons from one or other would be significant in my sample.

The 180mm lens in the link above came from the biggest seller of vintage Leica glass in Europe; first time, it was awful: sent it back. Second time around, much better but still not happy with it. I decided to service it myself, the difference in IQ is obvious. But it's a damn tricky lens to assemble, it took me hours and I ended up breaking a couple of small parts and the iris ring now has a shorter throw than it should, I can really see how they would fail at putting everything fine themselves; still, mechanically not perfect, but fully functional, and the image is better, so in the end I'm pretty happy with it. But it's not an experience the average user will enjoy.

YMMV
 
Samuel H said:
Most of my lenses are vintage Leitz for the Leica-R mount, from the 60s and 70s. They are just as good as modern glass... as long as you spend at least four times as much in said modern glass.
Other vintage lenses... not so good, unless you want their very particular "personality" on your image.

And in any case: vintage glass is a lottery. Some of my best lenses came to me badly assembled and with serious image quality issues.

Loads of tests here and here. And videos shots with them here.
Click to expand...

Samuel, I was curious... do you own all of those lenses in your test posts?... If you do, man you got the bug bad. I totally understand!!

To the OP.... buying vintage lenses can become a very heady almost addicting obsession. There are great lenses out there and they can look great on modern cameras. I get kind of a perverse thrill out of shooting images with a modern camera and lenses that are 25 to 40 years old. We could spend hours technically describing the details of the image quality that vintage lenses give, but i like to use the term, "Image Mojo". I think that pretty much sums it up. I like it.
 
Hehe, no, they're not all mine. It's the sum of 3 sets:
* I own a full set of Leica-R glass (24, 35, 50, 90, 135, 180) plus a CZJ 300mm and a couple of little sigmas for nearly-pocketable shoting (19mm and 30mm for NEX).
* My father got the photography bug a couple of years now, so he has a full Canon set that I can use if needed (samyang 8mm, tokina 11-16, canon 24 f/2.8, 40 f/2.8, 50 f/1.4, 70-200 f/4L IS).
* I have a seriously lensaholic friend who provided all the other vintage lenses (in fact that's the reason I met him in the first place, I was looking for vintage lenses to test and contacted him through vimeo; I love living in the future)

The vintage bug is a very real thing (Ignacio lent me five lenses between 50mm and 58mm, and I know he has many more).
I bought and sold a lot of lenses in the last 3 years (some of them are in the tests too), that's how I learnt to stop worrying and buy Leica. Now that I have the full set, I stopped researching lenses and have lots more time for other stuff :)
 
The Leica glass is sweet. I went with the vintage manual Nikkors, at first, for the vast availability and low cost but I have really come to like their "Mojo". I like their contrast, color rendition, their highlight handling (Just the right amount of beautiful blooming) and the way their flair. The Vivitar Series 1 zooms are also beautiful lenses but have a little more "Snappy" contrast, render colors a little more saturated, do not have as much highlight bloom but still flair very... "Organic". I almost became a "Lensaholic" when putting my primary kit together... watching 10 to 15, or more vintage lens actions on eBay at a time. I broke that cycle by being offered a pretty intricate project where the work horse vintage lenses I had really fit the bill but I needed to invest my money in grip, lighting and additional support gear. I wanted to get together a set of the higher end Canon FD primes, but I think that the window for finding the good ones at very inexpensive prices has closed. That seems to be the case almost across the board for quality vintage lenses. There are a lot of people like us that realize the value of high quality vintage lenses in the digital age. I think that this is where the vast availability of the Nikkor lenses is an advantage. The Nikon F mount lenses are some of the most manufactured lenses in the history of photography. There available numbers have kept their used prices down. The used Nikkors are, like all quality vintage lenses, very much appreciating in price. My pride and joy of my vintage Nikkors is my 20mm F2.8 AIS prime. It is a beautiful lens. I bought mine two years ago for about $175.00. You would be very, very hard pressed to find one in very good condition used for less than $300 these days. Yeah I recommend vintage lenses, but don't dawdle in get some.
 
Asahi Takumars are fairly affordable, plentiful, and totally all black anodized metal in construction. I love them. Although the lineup is lacking in fast sub-50mm models.

Here is the 50mm f2 on an af100:
 
@David: yes, I've been in that spot too, with lots of alarms on my phone in order to bid in the last minute of ebay auctions...
Luckily left the obsession away when I completed the set!

Re: Nikon: I haven't tried the best AIS ones, but for what I've tested I like Leicas better. In any case, they're at least twice the price, and the Nikons are not bad at all, so, good for you :)
 
I'll chime in on the Nikkors. Anything they've made since about the 1960's will work for you. There are dogs, so-so's, and stellar examples.

Start by figuring out the focal lengths you need. Then research like hell. There are vast differences between versions of the 28mm 2.8 for instance (with the AI-S version being the keeper... but the lowly Series-E can be had for under a hundred bucks - often for $50 - and is nice from F4 or so up).

Probably the best deal these days, old Nikkors, and even AF-era stuff has some classics. There are better lenses but you'll pay a lot more.

Vivitar has some keepers, but every one I've tried I've gotten rid of - side by side tests with Nikkors, they've always lost, YMMV. I have an old 35-70 2.8 AF and it's often my comparison tester. Awesome lens.

Leica's are lovely, but they'll cost ya!
 
Yeah, my 100mm F2.8 is a Nikon E series lens. While the E series were designed and marketed as less expensive, more consumer oriented lenses back in the day; compared to the build quality of modern lower end lenses they are built of much higher quality. I dropped my 100mm from about 5 1/2 feet and while it did dent the filter ring, the lenses still works great. I dare anyone to try that with these modern plastic body lenses and all of their micro electronics. There is no optical quality difference between the 100mm E series lens and the rest of my Nikkors that I can see.

Michael is right, if you are going to go down the vintage route, you really need to do your research. The first think you need to wrap your head around is lens mount Flange focal distance. This is the measurement of the distance from the flange, or point where the lens rests in the mount and the focal plan; where the image is focused on the sensor. As a general rule, lenses designed for a longer flange focal distance than the mount you are wanting to adapt to can relatively easily be mounted with a simple mechanical adapter. Lenses designed for a shorter flange focal distance than the mount you are wanting to adapt to need complicated optical adapters to work. An example of this is trying to mount Canon FD lenses to a Canon EF or EF-s mount camera. There are optical adapters to mount FD lenses to EF and EF-s mount camera, but, I think, they lose light and have varying image quality. What I am very frustrated about is that the Arri PL mount has a relatively long flange focal distance so there are very, very few still lenses that will adapt to them with just inexpensive mechanical mounts. All of my Nikon F mount lenses are SOL when it comes to mounting to a PL mount camera, to the best of my knowledge. I can anticipate moving up to a PL mount camera in the near future, but the need for new lenses adds a wrench to that.
 
The mighty (for a hundred bucks) 100 series-E, T2i video frame:

MVI_3026.jpg

(I think I've posted this frame often, whenever the subject comes up...)
 
What about the older Leitz rangefinder lenses? How best to adapt them to a Nikon? I have a couple I haven't shot with since film days on a M3, but they had awesome contrast, and of course bokeh.
 
Those are very nice lenses, but they won't work on a Nikon F camera. I guess they are m39 or Leica-M mount, which means they would work on mirrorless mounts (NEX, m43) but not on reflex mounts.
 
I'm still going to check into it. I seem to remember Novoflex having an adapter. I'll let you know what I find out. Thanks for the discussion.
 
daplight said:
I'm still going to check into it. I seem to remember Novoflex having an adapter. I'll let you know what I find out. Thanks for the discussion.
Click to expand...
there are adapters, sure, but they either have glass elements (and kill the IQ from your lovely lenses) or they don't respect the correct focal flange distance (so the lens becomes macro-only)
 
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