Originally posted by derekkite Factor in a bit of survivor bias. The great old lenses that are talked about were the good ones. The bad ones are being sold on ebay to suckers.
Ha! Although I think more of the overpriced steaming.turd lenses show up on CL.
I'll put in a word for lenses of the early Kodachrome era (which was mostly prior to zooms) and Darwinian pressure. Lenses that weren't sharp enough to project detail on 'chrome generally didn't survive. I think our love of lenses of that age is precisely because they necessarily had good-enough optics and haptics.
NOTE: Hay kids! Today's word-of-the-day is HAPTICS, which here refers to the touchy-feely qualities of an item. If it feels good, etc...
And I'll distinguish golden-age Kodachrome glass from the later, degenerate Kodacolor era (and the birth of zooms), when parking-lot photo-processors printed gazillions of snapshots on
textured paper with absolutely no care for resolution, aberrations, etc. Those crappy early Sigma and other consumer-grade zooms survived because their low IQ was trivial compared to excreble mass-print technology.
Yes, most newer zooms have better optics than most older zooms, though exceptions abound. Yes, many older primes had better haptics than many newer zooms because we don't like those plastic surfaces. And I have a special dislike for older MF pancake primes, just because they're so hard to grab to focus -- and my fingers aren't fat. That's mainly why my very sharp pancakes (Meyer Helioplan 40/4.5; Chinon 45/2.8; Industar-50-2/3.5) don't get much use.
But I digress. I'll fall back on one of my imperfect (but useful) over-generalizations: AF zooms (newer) are great for TAKING pictures. MF primes (older) are great for MAKING pictures. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.