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04-02-2015, 04:37 AM - 1 Like   #1
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Older (MF/manual aperture) lenses to avoid on E-bay?

Setting aside the whole question of how to go about assessing them (though any hints are appreciated) and the mire of trouble that E-bay can sometimes be in itself, are there any brand names or specific lenses (such as they may be) which are KNOWN to be either nothing but trouble or optically not worthwhile?

Are there names which only got their act together after a certain time, or fell into disrepute after a certain time?

Particular lenses of any brand that have a particularly poor reputation?

And so on.

I don't particularly care if they're no better than the kit lenses of their day - I'm looking out for things that are significantly worse. The stuff nobody should touch with a barge pole.

Conversely, are there any sleepers in there? The ones which on brand label you'd think were trash but turned out to be surprisingly good or desirable.

No brand snobbery, please. I don't want this to be a debate over Asahi Pentax/Takumar vs. third-party.

I have the M42 adapter on the way, so advice on lenses with all mounts from M42 screw to current is welcome.

04-02-2015, 05:16 AM   #2
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I think the main problem are lenses like Samyang, Vivitar, Sears.. because they were made by various manufacturers. So they have some surprisingly good lenses, but some bad ones as well.
04-02-2015, 05:20 AM   #3
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Honestly....I haven't found a bad one yet ! Some are just Better than others. If you stick with primes , there seems to be a higher image quality overall.
04-02-2015, 05:30 AM   #4
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There are some Takumars (as well as other brands as well) that had no coatings. These lenses are usually very poor performers as they were designed from the start to be cheap. They may have been merely adequate in 4x6 film prints, but will not cut it today. Poor contrast, flares, etc.

Thanks,

04-02-2015, 05:51 AM   #5
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Stick with primes is good advise, personally I have better luck buying lenses that are sold with a camera and sometimes with a bag. Some of those may hVe been sitting in a closet with little use. Watch for dented filter rings, those lens have bee dropped. A lo of the different names may have been made by anyone, you will see a lot of listing claim they were made by Kiron when they probably were not, the Kirons are popular because they are known to be very sharp, they are also known to get oily blades. I have a Cosmicar lens that I really like, it's supposedly made by Asahi. When the price is right anything is worth a try.
04-02-2015, 06:21 AM   #6
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Pursue vintage lenses for these reasons (no particular order): cost (often next to nothing!), interest, experience (learn a lot), character and quality, Cost is big for me, when you consider that a SMC-A 50mm 1.7 can be picked up for around £20-30 and blows the kit lens away with its speed and IQ!

Figuring out what to go for is part of the game - Asahi/pentax and other OEM lenses are pretty much guaranteed quality. All the rest - be prepared to do a bit of legwork, starting by putting the lens in the browser search to find find forum threads, posted pics, online reviews/comments.

Check out these threads on this subject:

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/58-troubleshooting-beginner-help/259929-s...es-online.html

https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/10-pentax-slr-lens-discussion/275955-my-n...used-lens.html

Oh, and there is a large kernel of truth in the assertion by a contributor to The Luminous Landscape when he remarked:
"90% of lenses are sharper than 90% of photographers!"

Last edited by marcusBMG; 04-02-2015 at 06:29 AM.
04-02-2015, 06:35 AM   #7
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It's a lot easier to say which are the good ones than which are the bad ones. As Na Horuk said many brand names have been bought and sold several times and lenses produced under them range from exceptional to appalling.

04-02-2015, 07:12 AM   #8
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I created a database to track the large quantity I've purchased. I mechanically and optically test each one that comes in and have done some statistical analysis. (I repair many also, so I get to see exactly what is wrong with any problem ones.) The single most consistent thing I see is: Sample variation increases with age, particularly before '75 or so when a small but significant number have grease breakdown and this increases as you move back into the '60's. The incidence of lenses with grease breakdown that have fungus is high because the grease by products become fungus food. The second thing I see is cemented element separation in early-mid 70's to early 80's lenses.

Avoid zooms with any sort of issue as they are generally more difficult to repair. Don't buy lenses with loose or tight focusing action.

The following lenses in my database have high performance/price ratio:
Last model SMC Takumar 55 1.8 and 2.0 (the ones with the rubber grip)
Any of the manual focus Pentax 50mm 1.7's
You can occasionally get the SMC Pentax 135 3.5 (original K version) for cheap.
04-02-2015, 07:51 AM   #9
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QuoteOriginally posted by Na Horuk Quote
I think the main problem are lenses like Samyang, Vivitar, Sears.. because they were made by various manufacturers. So they have some surprisingly good lenses, but some bad ones as well.
Sears IS Samyang, or at least the Sears Model 202's. The only outright bad lens I've come across from them is their 28-70 macro. The rest range from decent to outright amazing (for a department store lens).

When buying Sears (at least K-mount Sears) there appear to have been four manufacturers - Ricoh, Chinon, Tokina and Samyang.

Ricoh made most of the 50mm kit lenses, as well as most of the Sears KS bodies. The exception is (I think, not looking it up so this is off the top of my head) the Sears KSX-P, which was Chinon. Chinon also made a 50mm prime for Sears, which is identifiable because it has more aperture stops, a heftier build, and is slightly bulkier than the Ricoh 50's. The Chinons are more rare than the Ricohs by a good margin. They're also generally better lenses from what I've seen.

Everything not-a-50 seems to be either Samyang or Tokina. There could be another maker out there, but I'm really don't think there was.

The Samyangs are identifiable due to the fact that they're marked "Made in Korea" and are usually branded as a "Sears Model 202". Most range from decent to good. As I mentioned, the exception seems to be the 28-70 Macro. My copy is just awful, and every review I;ve seen of it mirrors the same issues - zero flare control, zero contrast, etc etc. You get Instagram without the work of using Instagram.

The best (at least in my opinion) are the older Sears K-mount lenses, which are generally black with silver piping and marked Made in Japan. These are the Tokinas and are basically the exact same lenses Tokina sold under its own name. They're heavy, mostly metal, and built like tanks. I have yet to hit a bad one, and (bearing in mind these are 1980's vintage lenses) are very good to excellent for the era they're coming from.

There are also some Sears lenses that *look* like a K-mount at a casual glance but very much are not - these are Mamaya/Sekors, and have a completely different mount. They seem to have been the bridge between the older M42's (I don't know much about the screwmounts, other than they seem to mostly be Ricoh/Tokina as well) and the K-mounts.

One last thing to note about the old Sears lenses - many of them have whats called the "Ricoh Pin" in them. Do yourself a favor and read up on that ASAP. You will want to either be very, very carefl with a lens that has that pin still intact, or do what many people do and grind it of or remove it entirely. It will jam on a modern Pentax DSLR and will induce much profanity and stress when you realize that you can't get your lens back off your camera after you've attached it. The thing to look for is they're usually marked as "KR". Of course that's 'usually'. It always pays to check when you're buying an old school third party lens, just in case.

Samyang also seems to have made a number of lenses for... just about everyone. If its marked as Korean, its *probably* a Samyang.

FWIW, I have the Tokina made 135mm, 300mm, 75-260 and... something else I'm missing as well as most (not quite all, but most) of the Sears 202's as well as most of the 50's (I'm missing the 50 1.4's, otherwise I have all of them).

Of course, the caveat to all of this is when you're buying 30+ year old lenses you really have no control over how people have treated them in the past. A lens thats otherwise stellar could be shot because someone ran it into the ground and you'd never know.

Last edited by Sagitta; 04-02-2015 at 07:58 AM.
04-02-2015, 09:36 AM - 1 Like   #10
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Lenses where you should investigate before buying:

Revuenon, Porst, Weltblick.
These were house brands of the big German chains with European wide very high sales numbers, made in Japan, East Germany, or USSR.
Revuenon (from Foto-Quelle) had no really bad ones, they all were between average and good (many lenses were from Chinon). Porst a bit behind (many lenses from Cosina), and Weltblick really mixed. All of them rarely from West German production.

Exakta. Not always to be avoided, but one should investigate. The brand name Exakta (for a long time East German) had been sold, and in the eighties the German market was flooded with these lenses, often even cheaper than Makinon. Some of them were quite good, some should just be used as a paper weight. Right now there are many Exakta lenses from that time (made in Japan) on German eBay.

Makinon. After I changed from (East German) Exakta to Pentax in 1981, for many years I read every comparing lens test published in Germany. Lenses branded Makinon were always the cheapest, and in nearly every test at the bottom of the recommended list. In the paperweight range. Myself I once bought a used 24mm WA (in PK mount), but owned it only till after the first roll of film returned - not sharp enough even for album prints.

@ismaelg
I cannot believe there exist uncoated Takumar SLR lenses. From beginning of the 1960s all lenses for SLRs of every brand were coated.
SMC coating came much later. But even Bayonet Takumars from end 1970s till mid 1980s were not only coated, but multi-coated. They just did not get the special Pentax SMC coating, but a standard multi-coating (as taught in every optical engineers study at university).

@dcshooter
"Various East German and Soviet lenses... ...are usually clones from..."
Not really.
  1. Before WWII, the center of Zeiss was in what became the Soviet sector at the end of the war, so Zeiss was splittet. Both the now 2 Zeiss companies had the right to use the designs from before and during the war, but it is not known that Zeiss Jena "cloned" newer Zeiss Oberkochen designs.
  2. The Soviet lenses (best known are Jupiter and Helios) are a different story. After the occupation of East Germany, the USSR (just like the USA) had the right to access every advanced German technology as war reparations, and they moved some complete Zeiss production lines (including the engineeers) to Russia and Ukraine. They did not invent many outstanding new designs, but over the years improved the Zeiss designs from the 1930s, just as it was done in the two Germanys.
  3. Meyer Görlitz are not known for Zeiss clones; for a long time they had been a tough competitor for Zeiss, many of their lenses being just as good.
  4. In the last decade of the East German state, most of the optical companies were melted to one; the lenses (many of them unchanged) were now called Pentacon, some of the better ones stayed with the Zeiss label, mainly for export. Most of the Pentacon lenses are in fact Meyer/Görlitz lenses, some are Zeiss. Many Pentacon lenses are known for outstanding center sharpness, obviously a legacy of Meyer.
04-02-2015, 09:54 AM   #11
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RKKS08: Thanks for the clarification. Then they must have some sort of generic coating. However, they are still very poor performers. I've had some of them.
04-02-2015, 09:58 AM   #12
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There is actually an UP side to acquiring BAD lenses. You'll learn far more shooting first hand with 'not-so-good' lenses (regardless of the cause or brand) than you will from reading comments on line - often repeated as gospel by folks without personal experience with problematic optics.

You'll be surprised just how much, or how little, certain "kiss-of-death" faults cause in practical shooting until you can actually compare good and "bad" lenses side-by-side for yourself.

Acquiring lenses for the price you'd pay for text books alone for a semester of college will be an education well worth the cost - and entertaining as well.

Another thing: one of the cheapest ways to acquire a 'WR' lens for an especially risky occasion is to use an expendable lens you picked up for peanuts. So maybe the corners ARE weak wide open but what were you gonna use it for that requires a $1000 lens anyway?
04-02-2015, 10:11 AM   #13
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In reality there are not bad lenses given the price you pay. Read the previous posts and look at the image archive, for which there are samples from about 400 lenses.

If you're not sure about a lens don't pay much. The one thing to consider is the flaws in some older lenses lead to unusual image. Artifacts. Learn how a lens performs and the. Think of how to exploit what that particular lens does. Not all great photos are technically perfect.
04-02-2015, 10:12 AM   #14
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@ramseybuckeye
Cosmicar was a Taiwanese subsidiary of Asahi, mainly known for cine lenses.
Pentax designs produced by Cosmicar were usually branded as Profile or Takumar [bayonet]. As far as I know, all of them had a standard multi-coating instead of SMC.

@ismaelg
I cannot speak for all non-SMC Takumars, but I own the Takumar [bayonet] 2.8/135, and the effect of reduced contrast and worse flare is small and most times not visible. I think Pentax improved also the non-SMC multi-coating over the years. But the difference between Pentax and Takumar bayonet branded lenses is mainly a simpler optical design. Less glass usually means less perfect optical correction. But this will be more visible with zooms than with 135mm tele lenses, which have a rather simple design anyway.
04-02-2015, 10:16 AM   #15
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QuoteOriginally posted by Na Horuk Quote
I think the main problem are lenses like Samyang, Vivitar, Sears.. because they were made by various manufacturers. So they have some surprisingly good lenses, but some bad ones as well.
...or not. Vivitar are consistently good for most of the brand's history with some (Series 1) being excellent. Most Sears lenses are re-labled Rikenon (Ricoh) and are usually good. Samyang, except for current models, I would avoid.

To the OP...Due to the literally hundreds of brands and thousands of lens models involved, it is usually easier to ask about lens suggestions rather than lenses to avoid.


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