Originally posted by Ratmagiclady I have a 2.5, which I actually kind of like. I bought it out of curiosity that the (single?) coating might yield a nice nostalgic look in monochrome, which I think it does. It's fun, being little and fast and a good deal longer, effectively, than I usually tend to shoot these days. The metering's kind of a pain, but it's well worth what I paid. I'd really like to put a longer hood on there than the built-in one, though, which I just haven't gotten around to.
You can easily remove the built-in hood. Focus so the lens is fully extended. Slide the hood out and grab the barrel exposed behind it. Then you can unscrew the front part of the lens, slide the hood off and screw it back together. This also provides convenient access to the aperture blades for cleaning, if/when they gum up.
The main thing with this lens is not performance but purchase price. You can find them from $10 to $100. Kind of like stocks, the best way to be happy with its performance/price ratio is to buy a really cheap one. Digital post-processing can easily fix most of the flaws. Corner performance, even on cropped sensors, is noticeably worse than the expensive 135s.