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The Sears lenses, much like VIvitar, were made by 3rd parties.  The range is limited for primes 28/50/55/135/300 (that I know of), but there were also some zooms in between.  Some of these lenses appear to be identical to ones made for other distributors.  A 55/2.8 macro by Komine that also exists for Vivitar, for example.  Most of them come in a variety of mounts.  Historically, the Sears name kept the prices on these lenses very cheap.  Some of them still are.  But the 55/1.4 started going up in the past ten years.

There's a thread at the Pentax Forums where they know much more about these lenses.

Sears Lens Club

 

I've owned the 135mm/2.8 Macro.  It's more of an "art lens" in most situations (but still very cheap).

 

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On 6/25/2021 at 10:17 AM, Pekka Riikonen said:

Also, don't forget medium format lenses.  With a speedbooster you can get the medium format angel of view on 35mm.  Kipon makes 0.7x speedbooster with LPL mount (and other mounts).

I was so busy swallowing my own tongue over the price of that 21mm that I completely overlooked this.

Are there any even-vaguely-affordable options for old medium format lenses that can be adapted to modern cameras? I know next to nothing about medium format stuff.

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2 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Are there any even-vaguely-affordable options for old medium format lenses that can be adapted to modern cameras? I know next to nothing about medium format stuff.

It doesn't make sense to adapt any medium format lenses to most motion picture film or digital cameras. The widest lens you'll get for medium format is the 38mm Zeiss Biogon for the Hasselblad SWC. It's pretty slow at f/4.5, but a stellar lens. After that, the most affordable is the Schneider 47mm Super Angulon from the old Brooks Veriwide 100 and later Veriwide offerings. Again, not a fast lens but very wide for a camera that can shoot 6x11. 

There is no fast, cheap, and wide offering that you can easily stick on an EF camera. The widest and fastest you'll get would probably be the 24mm f/2 Nikkor. 

Phil Forrest

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30 minutes ago, Philip Forrest said:

The widest lens you'll get for medium format is the 38mm Zeiss Biogon for the Hasselblad SWC. It's pretty slow at f/4.5, but a stellar lens.

My Mamiya 24/4.0 (for the 645 camera) says "hold my beer"

Duncan

 

mamiya_645_24_40_01.thumb.jpg.c31e9fab6332cc9a4ddde1476c1bd92c.jpg

Edited by Duncan Brown
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I was meaning rectilinear when I mentioned the 38mm SWC lens, since fisheyes are quite limited in their utility. Most fisheyes are more expensive anyway, and the theme of the thread is kind of using other optics on the cheap. If you want to talk expensive fisheyes, there's the 6mm, 8mm, 13mm and 15mm Nikkors alone. Unfortunately, the rear elements are too deep with all but the 15mm. Same goes for the Pentax 19mm, 2.1cm Nikkor, Yashica 19mm, and the Minolta 19. The aforementioned Nikkor shouldn't be in the same group as those fisheyes though, because it's a rectilinear superwide, just like the 38mm Biogon. There is a superwide medium format lens, the Schneider Apo-Digitar but it's quite slow and very expensive. 

Back to the original topic though, Spiratone marketed a 28mm f/2 in many different mounts.

Phil Forrest

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Is there anything like a speed booster that would operate meaningfully with these lenses? It'd make for shorter effective focal length and more speed, of course, but I suspect we're getting into the realms of fantasy in terms of price.

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2 hours ago, Philip Forrest said:

It doesn't make sense to adapt any medium format lenses to most motion picture film or digital cameras. The widest lens you'll get for medium format is the 38mm Zeiss Biogon for the Hasselblad SWC. It's pretty slow at f/4.5, but a stellar lens.

A local rental house here in Melbourne has a set of Mamiya 645 lenses rehoused by GL Optics, with the widest being a T3.5 35mm. Most are T2.8:

https://www.thevisionhouse.com.au/equipment/lenses/gl-optics/g-l-optics-medium-format

I checked them over when they first bought them - they are lower resolution than S35 lenses, but that's pretty normal for larger format lenses. They cover up to a 75mm image circle, which means you're only using the centre of the circle to cover full frame or Arri LF/Red Monstro etc (which needs around a 46mm circle), cutting out some of the corner fall off. They make an nice alternative to just using normal full frame stills lenses - it's a softer, subtly different look. You can always supplement the wide end with other lenses.

 

1 hour ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Is there anything like a speed booster that would operate meaningfully with these lenses? It'd make for shorter effective focal length and more speed, of course, but I suspect we're getting into the realms of fantasy in terms of price.

TLS have recently begun offering Mamiya 645 rehousings with a speed booster incorporated in the housing, which is an interesting concept:

https://www.newsshooter.com/2020/07/14/tls-mamiya-645-rehousing/

Kipon make speed boosters for Mamiya 645 lenses, for a variety of mounts including LPL, Sony E and Canon. At around $800 for the smaller mounts it's not super expensive, and the Mamiya lenses themselves are often quite cheap.

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23 hours ago, Dom Jaeger said:

TLS have recently begun offering Mamiya 645 rehousings with a speed booster incorporated in the housing, which is an interesting concept:

On that basis, I wonder what the results might be using Hexanons with the optical correction mounts. I find myself wanting to put the same lens on my MFT mount camera both with and without the optical correction, since that'd actually be possible on the shallow mount, and see what the difference is.

 

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On 6/29/2021 at 10:15 AM, Phil Rhodes said:

Is there anything like a speed booster that would operate meaningfully with these lenses? It'd make for shorter effective focal length and more speed, of course, but I suspect we're getting into the realms of fantasy in terms of price.

Short answer: yes. I don't know the details.

On 6/29/2021 at 11:31 AM, Dom Jaeger said:

they are lower resolution than S35 lenses,

I'm not so sure about that, actually... However, what is undoubtable is that you have an image circle way larger than you need, which is nothing but a benefit, especially if you are using shift movements.

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37 minutes ago, Karim D. Ghantous said:

I'm not so sure about that, actually... 

What are you basing that opinion on?

It's always somewhat lens dependent but as a general rule, larger format lenses don't need the same resolution requirements as smaller format ones, and it's harder to design them to maintain such resolution while covering so much more area, so you will find for instance that even high quality medium format lenses are almost always a bit softer than decent full frame or S35 lenses.

I say that from having personally projected many lenses and compared their performance, but you can also look at MTF graphs if you want to independently verify it. For instance, I recently posted some Hasselblad lens MTF curves, which are interesting to compare with say Zeiss CP.2 ones:

896643931_HasselbladvsCP_2MTF.png.209fd87e53428c066768ba22e45b6457.png

These are both 50mm. The CP.2 is measured at T2.1 as opposed to f/2.8 for the Hasselblad, but it still clearly out-resolves the larger format lens at all frequencies. Note that you need to only look at the left half of the Hasselblad graph to replicate the same 20mm image height as the CP.2, and compare the red, orange and light blue frequencies with the 3 frequencies mapped for the Hasselblad. 

 

1 hour ago, Karim D. Ghantous said:

However, what is undoubtable is that you have an image circle way larger than you need, which is nothing but a benefit, especially if you are using shift movements.

Having a much larger image circle than you need is actually not always beneficial, because a lens is a set of compromises, and a larger image circle requires more compromises to achieve. As those graphs illustrate, even using the centre of a high quality medium format lens still doesn't make it sharper than a decent lens designed for a smaller format. There are of course many attributes to a lens other than resolution that make it still worth using.

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On 7/1/2021 at 12:18 AM, Dom Jaeger said:

What are you basing that opinion on?

Many years ago I recall a discussion about this kind of topic. Someone who shot with Mamiya lenses refuted another's claims that medium format lenses aren't as sharp as 35mm lenses. He said that some Mamiya lenses are actually sharper than many 35mm units. I can't find that discussion now.

But keep in mind that you have to compare contemporaries. You can't compare a Leica SL lens to an old Hasselblad V system lens and conclude that medium format isn't as sharp as miniature formats.

However, I found the below threads somewhat interesting. Conclusion: it practically doesn't matter, as the differences are often small. BTW, the MTF graphs you posted are certainly believable, but the problem is mostly one of perception: the 80mm lens goes to an image height of 40mm whereas the 50mm goes to 20mm. I dare say that a photographer has more uses for a larger image circle than a DP does.

https://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/1238665/

https://www.slrlounge.com/nikon-d800-with-medium-format-lenses-and-setup/

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I think in any practical setup a medium-format lens used for cinematography is likely to find itself on some sort of speed booster, anyway, which will change (not necessarily improve) the relationship between speed and sharpness in complicated ways. I would expect an old medium format lens to be gently soft, perhaps in a reasonably nice way, and adapted it might look substantially sharper but suffer various aberrations from the often-cheap converter optics. I don't know if that expectation is reasonable.

 

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The reason that medium and large format lenses show lesser performance when compared with miniature format lenses, besides age and individual lens condition, is that the viewing distance of the final print is assumed to be greater, which negates the issues we see these days of "pixel peeping."  These lenses are designed with this in mind, allowing some compromises.

Phil Forrest

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I recently had reason to check into FD prices.

The situation is that anything physically marked "SSC" or "Aspherical" is getting expensive, with a few exceptions, such as the 50mm f/1.4 SSC. Possibly this is due to the (erroneous) assumption that anything with those markings is basically a K35.

The more recent "new FD" lenses, often referred to as nFD, are considerably more affordable and a set including the 24/2.8, 35/2, 50/1.4, 85/1.8 and 135/3.5 can be had for reasonable money, although the 85 still goes for over £300. Reportedly these still have the SSC coating system, it just isn't mentioned in the engraving.

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2 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

I recently had reason to check into FD prices.

The situation is that anything physically marked "SSC" or "Aspherical" is getting expensive, with a few exceptions, such as the 50mm f/1.4 SSC. Possibly this is due to the (erroneous) assumption that anything with those markings is basically a K35.

The more recent "new FD" lenses, often referred to as nFD, are considerably more affordable and a set including the 24/2.8, 35/2, 50/1.4, 85/1.8 and 135/3.5 can be had for reasonable money, although the 85 still goes for over £300. Reportedly these still have the SSC coating system, it just isn't mentioned in the engraving.

The SSC coating apparently is on the nFD lenses, that's true, but it evolved over time to take on a less magenta and more reddish orange if I'm not mistaken tint that flares less aesthetically imo. Not sure how much difference it makes, but I have some newer nFDs (85mm f1.2, 50mm f1.2) and older (24mm f1.4) and the older one flares nicer, as did the SSC Aspherical FD I owned before.

These prices have gotten so crazy across the board, though, imo. But I think people are looking for the K35 look and the SSC Aspherical line is as close as it gets, early nFDs perhaps next closest. 

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On 6/25/2021 at 1:30 AM, Phil Rhodes said:

Vivitar Komine may be another manufacturing plant, or just a branding exercise. There's a fast wide, the 24/2, but the range misses out on something in the 50mm region.

anybody has and idea if its possible to get from pk mount to pl mount?

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4 hours ago, david jenewein said:

anybody has and idea if its possible to get from pk mount to pl mount?

I'd assume not, given the PK flange depth is considerably less than the PL. The PK lens would have to be physically inserted into the PL mount. Possibly it could be done by including corrective optics in the adaptor, but that'd be expensive and cost image quality.

What's the camera?

P

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20 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

I'd assume not, given the PK flange depth is considerably less than the PL. The PK lens would have to be physically inserted into the PL mount. Possibly it could be done by including corrective optics in the adaptor, but that'd be expensive and cost image quality.

What's the camera?

P

good to know thanks. the camera is a sony f55. thx

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20 minutes ago, david jenewein said:

good to know thanks. the camera is a sony f55. thx

Hang on, the F55 has an FZ mount; the PL mount is an adaptor you've maybe never taken off, but you can. I don't know if anyone's ever made Pentax K to FZ, but it's at least potentially doable.

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2 minutes ago, Phil Rhodes said:

Hang on, the F55 has an FZ mount; the PL mount is an adaptor you've maybe never taken off, but you can. I don't know if anyone's ever made Pentax K to FZ, but it's at least potentially doable.

yeah you're right phil, i only started considering that today cause a friend of mine also mentioned that today. there is a fair amount of adapters to fz mount tbh, but didn't come across any pentax k to fz. just looking into options for getting old photo lenses to shoot with.... thx

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