_ It is time for my second test so far. This I quickly tested 4 very cheap 200mm primes, all 4 in very easily adaptable M42 mount.  200mm is a nice long focal length for video, anything longer and camera starts go become very shaky, so for the long shots 200mm is one of the best choices. Back in a day, 200mm along was found any every big camera manufacturer’s range.  There are so many 200s out there. I have bought about 10 myself for my research. They are very easy to get hold of and most are very cheap. Like I mentioned in my previous post, old photo lenses have some great advantages over the modern EF lenses, but at the end of the day the optical quality matters the most.

Well, I tested the first 4 and I’m not crazy about the results. I shot everything on a very dull, humid, hazy day, which didn’t help the contrast and colours. Everything was shot with a neutral profile and all footage is ungraded.

Let’s look at the results of each lens.:

Hanimar 200mm f/3.5.  This a well built lens, with a nice focusing ring, but optically it is very poor, not only the contrast and colours are not impressive, but the sharpens is also very poor with loads of CA. I bought it for only £10, so if you only have £10 to spend and you don’t have anything in this range, it might be better than nothing at all, but there are better lenses out there that can be bought for around £10, so for me this lens scores 2 out of 5.

Chinon 200mm f/3.5. Quite a decent lens, well build, has inbuilt adjustable hood. Nicest looking lens out of 4.  Optically for me it is also the best. Best clarity, contrast and colours, sharpness is decent too. Still looks quite washed out, but I believe that is due to the weather conditions.  This lens assembled in the same was as Nikon lenses. It focuses in the same direction and aperture is adjusted in opposite direction from another 3 lenses. This could be great if you are a Nikon lens user, but for me,  this sort of construction doesn’t really work, especially when using follow focus. I paid less than £10 for my one, but average price on eBay is slightly higher, still well worth the money though. I would give this lens 4 out of 5

Optimax 200mm f/3.5. Very similar to the Chinon above. Similar build quality, also with the lens hood, but it’s quite loose and the aperture blades are stuck and only close a little, which is a problem with my particular copy, should not apply to every Optimax 200mm out there. Optically it is also very similar to Chinon, just a touch darker.  Overall good alternative to Chinon, but due to the problems with my particular copy I would only score it 3 out of 5.

Prinzgalaxy 200mm f/4.5.  This lens is very deferent from the other 3. First of all it is much slower at f/4.5. The lens also looks deferent and has deferent construction. The good points of this lens are: the fluid aperture adjustment, great fox fine-tuning exposure during the recording (just like on Cine-lenses) and 16 blade aperture. Unfortunately all of that makes little sense with this lens, firstly because this is very, very stiff; both focusing and aperture adjustment requires a lot of effort, which means you can’t really easily fine-tune anything. The 16 blade aperture also makes little sense since this lens is so slow that you probably wouldn’t close the aperture too often to take advantage of all these blades.  The problems don’t end the, optically it is also quite poor, very low contrast, in result washed out colours too. Sharpness is ok, but overall, this lens is not really worth looking at, considering that it costs about the same as the other 3. I give it 1 out 5. Unless you can pick one up for no more than £5, I wouldn’t recommend buying it.

My conclusion: The 2 lenses that stand out  are Chinon and Optimax, but even they are not brilliant, at least no in this test. I used Chinon on one corporate shoot and it actually performed very well along side Helios 135mm, which in my previous test looked much punchier, so I think the colours and contrast would have been much better in better lighting conditions. 

I think both Chinon and Optimax are worth the money you would pay for them. They are 10 times cheaper than any modern equivalent, but certainly not 10 times worse. I still have at least another 4-5 200mm lenses to test and review including a very exciting Pentax 200mm f/2.5, which is one of the most expensive vintage lenses I bought, but still very cheap comparing to any modern equivalent, so expect another 2-3 videos on 200mm lenses.  Next up though, I will do a quite test of Nikon 50mm f/1.4 and more group test of 28mm and 50mm lenses. If you guys want see any other specific tests, let me know.

I don't need so many 200mm lenses, so I decided that I will give away one of these lenses. I don't want to give away some total rubbish, so I'll give away the Chinon 200mm f/3.5, probably the best lens out of 4. I will soon announce how to win this lens, it is going to be something very simple, so make sure that you follow me either on YouTube or Tweeter to make sure you don't miss the announcement and rules.
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__ It has been a long time since my last post on the website. In the background though I’ve been doing a lot of research and buying quite a lot of vintage lenses for my own use and for my vintage lens guide.

So I finally got around to doing the first quick test of the few lenses I recently acquired. This is a test of 4 135mm lenses, all in m42 mount, very easily adaptable to any modern DSLR. 135mm lenses are virtually non existent in modern lens world, but back in a day, they used to be popular, so there are many of them out there, over 30 that I know of. I now have around 10 myself, so this is something that I would like to call part 1 as there will be at least one more or quite possibly a few more 135mm lens orientated tests.

I really like 135mm. The first I bought was Helios 135mm f/2.8, which I really like (more about it below). 135mm f/2.8 makes a nice, quite fast 200mm on a 1.5x crop camera like the lovely Sony Nex 5N and on 4/3 camera this becomes a 270mm 2.8, pretty incredible for the price you will pay for such lens. I’m more than happy using such lens as a 135mm on my 5D too, still pulls in the subject quite a lot.

All 4 of the lenses in this test can be picked up on eBay for around £5-£30 depending on your luck, sellers description, type of listing and condition. Some are sold in larger quantities than others, not to say that the rarer ones are the better ones.

I’ll go through every lens separately and talk about pros, cons and my opinion on each of them. I’ve made the video above to go with the write-up, so you guys can take a look at the images these lenses produce and make up your own mind them.

The closest lens that I could compare these to is my Canon 100mm f/2.8 Micro, which is a very nice, very sharp lens, but not great for video for one reason, the focusing ring has such a short through it’s virtually impossible to keep the moving subject constantly in focus. Every little adjustment on the lens shifts the focus significantly. The other problem that Canon EF lenses have, or something that they don’t have, are the hard stops, The lenses spin past the end focusing range and this can mess up the focus marks on a follow focus, if you use one.

So lets start:

HELIOS 135mm f/2.8. Like as said above, this was one of the first vintage lenses I bought and actually the one that I ended up using the most along side my Canon EF. Unlike the 100mm, this old Russian lens has very nice, long through focusing ring that really allows me to fine-tune the focusing very precisely. As I said in one of my previous posts these lenses remind me of Cine lenses. Well build, long through focus, aperture adjustment on the lens, on some lenses it is even fluid like on Cine lenses, so to me these are little budget cine-lenses, so much more suitable for video work and manual focusing than modern EF lenses. This applies to most vintage photo lenses, not just this Helios. These were made for manual focusing, so that is what they do best.
The build quality of Helios 135mm is lovely, but what about the optical quality. Well, for the amount of money I’ve paid for it ( about £15), the image quality is pretty amassing. I felt confident enough to use this lens on a few corporate jobs and even on a greens screen music video. Let me tell you, the images it produced were very crisp, with lovely colours and contrast.  You can see in the video, how it performs comparing to the others. One of the best out of 4 for sure.
One of the downside I’ve noticed in these vintage lenses, including this Helios, is a visible amount of CA (chromatic aberration), which is especially evident on silver wind chimes on the left of the frame. CA is not evident in every situation, but should be noted as a downside, although it is not uncommon in modern day lenses and can also be found in cheaper modern lenses too, so don’t let this put you of and look at more expensive, low-end modern alternatives in hope of better image quality; it is not always the case and paying more doesn't always mean better quality, which is what these test the my lens guide will be all about.
Another little downside of Helios 135mm for some might be a 6 blade aperture which produces polygonal bokeh when the lens is stepped down, the bokeh is also much fussier than on some other lenses, which is not necessary a bad thing. Smooth like butter Bokeh might not always be the best thing, depending on what you are trying to capture and the feel you are going for. I personally didn’t have any problems with the lens. The overall look of the images matches the my other, modern lenses really well.  Will definitely be taking a closer look at this lens and will do more test videos with it.
At the moment I would give this lens overall score of 4 out of 5.

PROMURA 135mm f/2.8. Not so impressed with this lens. While colours and contras are similar to Helios, the sharpness is nowhere as soon.  Another downside is that the lens only focuses to 2.5m, which in not really acceptable considering that 3 others focused to my foreground object without any problems.  Promura has a 6 blade aperture same as Helios and CA is similar to Helios too.
The lens is made in Japan, but you wouldn’t say that by it’s optical quality. It is nicely build, no plastic parts that are usually found in modern lenses, but the focus ring is little stiff and the focusing through is very short comparing to the other 3. 
I’ve paid £10 for mine and even at this price I would only give this lens 2 out 5, there are just to many other 135s that are much better.  Time to stick it back on eBay. :) The only weird thing, all the other Promura 135s I found on eBay at the time of writing a completely different, so please note, that my conclusion only applies to this particular design.

CHINON 135mm f/2.8. This lens has very obvious low contrast and washed out colours. Sharpness is quite good, but CA is really evident even though the lens is Multi Coated which is suppose to cut down the CA.  The images captured through this lens looked like something shot on flat picture profile.  Contrast can obliviously be added in post production (I tried and it looks fine), but I think it should really look as good as possible straight out of the camera. Since the lens is not really cheaper than the others (I paid £10 for mine), I see no excuse for such low contrast.
The build quality is good. The focus ring is actually the nicest one of 4, very smooth and focuses easily. There is also an inbuilt, adjustable lens hood. The lens is made in Japan.
This is not the only Chinon 135mm available. Most of Chinon 135s I found on eBay at the time of writing are actually different from this one. I’ll try to buy one of them cheap and see what the image quality is like.  I suspect it might be different, so I wouldn’t judge  of all Chinon 135s by this copy, but this particular copy only scores 3 out of 5 in this test.

Dollonds 135mm f/3.5.  At f/3.5 this is the slowest lens out of the lot, but in some ways the nicest. It is the smallest, lightest lens, which straight away makes it very suitable for smaller cameras like Mirrorless 4/3 cameras and Sony’s NEX range. I recently bought the NEX 5N and this lens will probably look the most organic out of 4 on such camera. There are a few more advantages this lens over other 3 lenses, which are:
The fluid aperture adjustment (no clicks), which is great for fine-tuning the exposure just like on Cine lenses. A lot of people de-click  they photo lenses to archive such adjustment ability .  There is a second ring, that lets you adjust the aperture in stops/clicks.
The other nice advantage over the 3 other lenses is the 15 blade aperture. That is really nice and creates round, soft bokeh. There is some CA in this lens, but actually much more pleasant and unnotisable reddish colour rather than slightly annoying blue ghosting found on other 3.
So while the lens is slowest, in some ways it is the best. The lens is made in Japan, nicely build like the other 3. I paid £14 for mine which is still very cheap, the lens is well worth the money I paid.  I give it a strong 4 out of 5. If it was f/2.8 it would be 5/5.  The only bad thing, this lens is quite rare and at the time of writing there are none found on eBay.

My Conclusion: The 2 that stood out to me are Helios and Dollonds, very different but both nice in their own way. The Helios is always available is a good investment, no matter what camera you have. If you can find Dollonds and you are using something like 5N which has excellent low light performance, then this a great choice, even though it is f/3.5.
This is just the first test video. There will be more 135mm test and possibly dedicated longer test videos of Helios and Dollonds. Other than that I will be doing many more tests and my aim is to test around 100 manual lenses, so check back soon for more test. Next one will be: 4x cheap 200mm going head to head, so see you in the next post.

Lately I’ve been buying up a lot of cheap vintage photo lenses on eBay for my “Vintage Lenses for Video DSLRs” guide I’m currently working on.  By now, I discovered some many business sellers selling vintage lenses, but one of them stood out to me much more than the others, so I wanted to share this with everyone because it might be very useful to some of you. Before I go further, I just want to make it clear that I don’t know the seller personally and not trying to promote anyone’s business, I just think it is something unique, especially if you’re based in UK and as really worth sharing.

The eBay seller eddiehouston1545 has the eBay shop called The Lens Doctors. Unlike most sellers/shops, what sell vintage lenses, Eddie who runs the shop services all of the lenses he sales. While they are not the cheapest on eBay, all of them seem to be in such a wonderful condition. From reading the listings and shop info, you can tell that Eddie knows what he’s doing and a lot of work is spent on every listing and every lens sold.  While buying a serviced lens, which looks and works like new is very nice, it’s not the servicing that got my attention, but the aperture de-clicking and mount conversion of some lenses sold by Eddie.

If some of you don’t know what de-clicking is, let me explain. Most of older manual lenses have aperture adjustment on the lens, which is controlled by turning the aperture ring. Most of the rings have click stops, so there is a click with every change of aperture. Through the camera it looks pretty much the same as adjusting aperture with Canon EF lenses by turning the dial on the camera. If you adjust the aperture during the recording the image very suddenly brightens or darkens, depending on what your doing. Cine lenses on other hand have variable aperture adjustment, which means the aperture ring can be turned with the same smoothness as the focus ring, giving a very gradual aperture control, which can very useful in al lot of situations.  Let’s take a scenario where you are filming something indoors at the start of the take and then go outside into the bright daylight during the take. The image will overexpose as soon as you go outside. If you are like myself, filming on DSLR with fully manual control, you will be forced to adjust either the aperture, ISO or in worst case scenario your shutter speed. Any of the changes will result in image suddenly changing in unpleasant looking steps, rather than gradually. With variable adjustment one could avoid such situation by turning the ring slowly, gradually reducing the brightness without any “steps”.  I have the Samyang 35mm lens, that has smooth aperture adjustment (video version from ebay) and I do love it so much, it is such a nice way to fine-tune the aperture to your particular requirements, so the possibility of having such aperture on any vintage lens, sounds very appealing.

Eddie from The Lens Doctors sells some very cool lenses with such modification. He calls it Fluid Variable Aperture. Since I don’t think there is anyone else in UK  does that professionally, I assume it takes a very skilled technician to do that. He has 30 years of experience servicing and repairing lenses, so I think he knows what he’s doing and does it really well. A massive 5 star/100% feedback proves that dealing with Eddie must be a pleasure.

Some of the de-clicked lenses that are on sale at the time of writing are:

Mayer Orestegon 29mm f/2.8. Not only this lens has the variable aperture adjustment, but it’s also converted to EF mount with electronic focus confirm chip which takes advantage of focus confirmation function on a Canon DSLR. 

Tokina AT-X 24-40 f/2.8. Same features as above with  loads of lens history written in the listing. Viewing Eddies listings is actually a great way to learn about the cool, rare lenses and different manufacturers. Considering that Eddie used to be a Technical Manager for Canon UK, I think he knows what he’s talking about.

Vivitar 135mm f/2.8. Again modified to Canon EF mount with a focus confirmation chip, but this one is without Variable Aperture Adjustment. According to Eddie,  it’s one of the best 135mm lenses over. I already bought a few cheap 135mm lenses, would be so great to compare it to mine.

Tokina AT-X 80-200 f/2.8. Canon EF mount, lovely looking lens. A lot of people like to use Canon’s 70-200mm f/2.8 EF L lens for the video work and this lens looks like an amassing and relatively cheap alternative. That is the thing about the lenses found on thelensdoctors; they don’t seem cheap at the first instance, but when you find out more about them, they become a very tempting options. I certainly would have bought some of these lenses if I didn’t have to many already.            

There is a bunch of other really cool lenses currently on sale at thelensdoctors, most converted to EF mount and some with Fluid Variable Aperture installed.

These are really worth looking at if you are looking to buy some lenses for your Canon DSLR.  There are some real gems out there and in fact they worked out much cheaper than the same modern lenses.

If your like myself already have some vintage lenses, that are not in perfect condition or don’t fit your current camera, like Canon FDs that don’t Canon DSLRs, then Eddie can service, convert them to EF mount and even install the Fluid Variable Aperture, making your lenses as cool as the once he sales himself.  I just picked up a Zeiss lens, that might be worth investing some money into, so I’ll contact Eddie to see how much it will cost to give it this star treatment; hopefully will give me a discount for such a nice article :D

Otherwise I will certainly keep a studying Eddies lenses for to expand my knowledge of great vintage lenses.

Thelensdoctors is one of the coolest eBay shops I’ve found so far and will definitely go to my favorites list.

Back in a day when I used to do photography only, I wouldn’t touch anything other than Canon EF lenses, L series whenever possible. The only non-Canon lens I had and still have is my lovely Sigma 15mm fisheye.  When I first started using DSLRs for video, the only additional lens I bought was Canon 24-105mm L, great lens, but quite expensive.  Only recently I started looking into other lenses for video. Canon EF lenses, while really sharp, are not the best lenses for video. They are made for fast auto focusing, so manual focusing is difficult on these lenses, some like my 100mm f/2.8 has such a short focus throw, it is almost impossible to focus on a moving subject without constantly loosing focus.  EF lenses also have no hard stops, which can be a problem when using a follow focus with focusing marks. Lens will keep turning even once to reach the focusing limit, which will result in all focusing marks shifting out of place. 

This are the problems that will not be found in high-end cine lenses. However I don’t have money for cine lenses, so I started to look into what is available beyond Canon EF.

 The first lens I bought specially for video work was a Samyang 35mm f/1.4. Amassing lens, sharp, fast, well built, longer focusing throw and hard stops. Since I only focus manually in video work, absence of autofocus doesn’t bother me.  Since I bought Samyang, I started to thinking about the possibility of using vintage, manual focus lenses, which in theory would have same lovely features that Samyang has, but at even a lower price. I have to say I was skeptical about buying a proper vintage lens. I knew a lot of people were using vintage Nikon primes, so I figured they must be good enough. However I decided not to invest into old Nikon primes, because Nikon lenses focus in different direction (can be very confusing when focusing, especially with a follow focus). Also the prices for Nikon primes  gone up due to their popularity.

Canon FDs can’t be used on Canon DSLRs, so they were out for time being too.  I decided to just buy something cheap to try it out on my 5D and see if I want to invest any more money into such lenses. I went to a carboot sale and picked up 2 cheap lenses: Pentacon 29mm f/2.8 and Helios 58mm f/2. Each cost me around £3-£5, which is absolutely amassing price for any lens really. Even on eBay these 2 can be bough/won for around £10-£30, still quite amazing comparing to Canon L and even the Samyang. These lenses are quite fast (quite a bit faster than my much loved £700 Canon 24-105 f/4) and are really compact, which in most cases a good thing. The built quality is all metal,  so much better than quite a lot of plasticky Canon lenses. Same as Samyang they have longer, smoother focusing through, hard stops and aperture adjustment on the lens, just like proper cine lenses.

To me they are in fact like very low budget cine lenses. Very Low Budget doesn’t mean they are bad though. I picked up a cheap M42 to EF adapter on eBay stuck these lenses on my 5D. To my amassment they actually worked beautifully, no vignetting, focusing issues even though the full frame 5D MKII is the most incompatible DSLR camera for vintage lenses. Here is the useful 5D compatibility list for M42 mount lenses. Before anyone starts to question the optical quality of these lenses, I want to say that I haven’t used them 2 on any proper shoots yet, but I will start filming some test footage with every lens I buy (at such price, I will buy a lot of them) so you guys will be able to see the result and judge the optical quality yourself. 

Even though I haven’t tested these lenses properly in real life shoot, even from looking through the camera, I can safely say that for £5 that I paid for them, the quality is amazing, both built and optical. I used to have old Manual Praktica camera with a set of Pentacon primes including the 28mm and I remember how much a loved the pictures shot on the camera with this lenses.

From my very little research I found out that  my Helios 44M 58mm is actually a Zeiss Biotar 58mm f/2 Copy. The lens optics were based on Zeiss formulas, so these lenses are apparently very sharp, considering you get a good copy. Read a full article on this lens here. After reading it myself, I feel like I got the biggest lens bargain ever. Carl Zeiss quality for £3? That is the best kept secret in budget filmmaking world, or was I just living on a different “Canon-Only” planet? Anyway, if you didn’t know about this lens, now you know, so don’t hesitate even for a second to get one, at £10-£20 what have you got to loose? In worst case scenario you can sell it back on eBay.

I’ve very excited about all the incredibly cheap vintage lenses out there and my journey of discovery starts with this post. As mentioned above, I will test, review, shoot test footage with as many cheap lenses as I can afford to buy. I guess if I sell one Canon L, I could but around 50-100 Lenses :D

All of my research will hopefully end up as a very comprehensive  vintage lens guile for DSLR video. I already bought/won quite a few lenses on eBay (more about them in one of my next posts), so expect a lot of new vintage-lens-based content appearing on the website soon.

I know a lot of people are still very skeptical about vintage lenses unless they are Zeiss or Nikon.
What do you think about them? Would be great to know your thoughts and experience with vintage lenses if any.