![]() Zooms have improved a lot over the last three decades and most of the older ones aren’t very good.If you stop them down to f/8 many older lenses are competitive with modern lenses across the frame. Many legacy lenses are very good in the center from f/2 or f/2.8 where they are hard to distinguish from good modern lenses but sharpness decreases more towards the corners.Recently released modern lenses like the GM 1.4/85 or Zeiss 1.4/50 show a much stronger performance but they also cost a lot. At f/1.4 and wider older manual lenses are defined by lower contrast, mediocre sharpness and often busy bokeh.Some of the very best E-mount lenses right now are manual. If you want the very best image money can buy go for modern lenses. These lenses will not perform any worse on higher resolution sensors of 36 MP and more but not that many of them will make a lot of use of the additional pixels. There are many very affordable older lenses which give beautiful 24 megapixel (MP) files.Of course not every manual lens will be that good, here are some general observations I made while using manual lenses for 6 years: Here are two examples of very fine lenses: Sony a7 | Olympus OM 2/100 | f/2 | ~$600 Sony a7 | Minolta MD 2.8/35 | f/8 | ~$70 And there are even more which aren’t any good. The long answer: There are many old lenses which deliver very good image quality. But there is a big variation between manufacturers and age. Older lens coatings are less efficient this means that many lenses have lower contrast when you have a bright light source in your image.Newer Sony cameras like the Sony a7ii or a7rii feature an integrated image stabilizer which works with manual lenses! You need to tell the camera your focal length though which costs 2 or 3 seconds. If you use a Sony a7/a7s/a7r you have to carry a tripod more often and achieving focus with longer lenses is a bit harder. Image stabilizers are handy but manual lenses don’t have them.I wouldn’t recommend using JPG if you use manual lenses. While lateral CA can be corrected automatically by a raw-converter like Ligthroom you need to correct distortion and vignetting manually. If you adapt lenses exif information will be incomplete and the camera can’t correct lens defects like distortion, vignetting or lateral chromatic aberrations (CA).But you will miss some pictures you could have captured with the very good AF of most modern cameras. After some practice you will find that you can capture a lot more scenes with manual lenses than you thought. Other people like me prefer this process over using AF. Some people don’t enjoy the process at all. You have to do everything yourself. You have to think about the aperture and set it manually. ![]() Minolta MD 2/50 ~$25 Why shouldn’t I use manual lenses? ![]() Check out our manual photographers series to read other photographers stories who feel similar about this. Manual focusing can be very enjoyable. This certainly depends on application but personally I enjoy working with fully manual lenses a lot more than with any AF lens and I would choose a good manual focus lens over an AF lens (almost) any time.They also hold their value much better than modern lenses. With some patience you can sell most manual lenses without a loss but with new lenses you can expect to lose 30% in the first year.They can last a lot longer than modern lenses which are full of electronics and very complex designs, both of which make them more likely to fail. Old lenses are usually beautifully built from nothing but metal and glass which makes it a joy to handle them.Of course progress has happened in recent years but still affordable primes are often sharper than very expensive modern zooms. There are 30-year-old primes with better image quality than many modern lenses.You have a huge choice between thousands of lenses ranging from exotic ones with lots of “character” to some of the very best lenses available.For the $1000 you would have to pay for that Zeiss you can buy an excellent set of five lenses from 20 to 300mm. For most applications such a lens will give you 90% of the performance of a $1000 Zeiss 1.8/55 FE. ![]()
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