El-Cheapo Lenses

Where Ray and I differ on details, take his opinion first.

Lenses tend to be near their worst when wide open - all but the finest of them - and their best when stopped down a couple steps from their widest. That's why the 2.8 will be better at 4 than the 4 is.

Congrats! The 50mm/2.8 also makes a great handheld magnifier loupe. Fully color-corrected, sharp corner to corner. Better than any Triplet or other bespoke loupe. The 50/4 is good as a loupe as well but with a smaller field of view.

If it doesn't go too much higher I'm gonna snag it and find out.

I'm not seeing any signs of wear. No grime in the knob knurls (reeding), no slide marks on the rails, no chips, wear or scratches on paint and no circular scratches where the camera body attaches to the bellows.

I have one of these Canon FL Bellows. The build quality is fantastic -- it looks like there's no plastic or nylon at all. The bearings seem to be all metal (unlike the Canon FD Auto Bellows), and the operation is extremely smooth (better than the Canon FD, and like the Olympus bellows, both of which use plastic/nylon slide bearings).

However, there is a 1/2-inch long metal prong sticking out the back of the bellows where you'd attach the camera. I don't know if that would make attaching an EOS camera difficult. Hopefully a proper FL-EOS adapter would not be bothered by the prong? The Canon FD Auto Bellows does not have this prong.

BTW -- I've never tried to attach an EOS camera to the FL bellows. I use the Olympus bellows, because it's very easy to attach a Canon EOS camera to it, and it works perfectly (no adapters) with Olympus bellows lenses.

I have a set of Olympus Bellows lenses:

- 135mm f/4.5: officially covers 0.5x to 0.0x magnification

- 80mm f/4: 0.5x to 2X (I actually use this for all coin photos even below 0.5x, since I'm too lazy to swap out the lens, and it seems to work just fine.) Coinimaging.com has tested this lens and it seems to be slightly better than the 75mm f/4 EL-Nikkor. However, my unscientific tests show that the 75mm APO Rodagon-D 1x is better than the Olympus, for magnifications near 1x at least.

- 38mm f/2.8 (new style with OM mount): 1.7x to 8x -- I haven't used this much (just a few test stacks), and not for coins. I seem to recall that over at Macrophotography.net this lens (or the 20mm) did not perform as well as microscope objectives in the 4x to 5x range. At Coinimaging.com the Canon 35mm bellows lens tests out slightly better than the Olympus 38mm.

- 20mm f/2 (new style with OM mount): 4.1x to 16x -- I suppose you'd normally want to use microscope objectives in this magnification range. This lens might give better coverage for full frame sensors, though.

Note: there are older RMS-threaded versions of the Olympus 20mm and 38mm lenses. These don't have the fine focus helicoid present on the newer OM mount lenses. Also, the old 20mm Olympus lens is slightly radioactive, about 0.5% to 3% as active as the benchmark Pentax 50mm f/1.4 S-M-C Takumar. I guess it contains Thorium -- I've never done any gamma ray spectroscopy to verify this.

The Canon 35mm was actually somewhat better than the Olympus, according to Coinimaging.com At 3x, the resolving power of the Canon is about 2.2 microns, and the Olympus is about 2.35 microns (at f/2.8). At 2x, the Canon is 2.8 vs 2.9 for the Olympus.





As far as I know, the radioactive 50/1.4 Takumars are the 7-element version of the Super Takumar (not the early 8-element version), and all S-M-C 50/1.4 Takumars. Later 50/1.4 SMC Takumars, and some SMC Pentax 50/1.4 lenses are also radioactive, but I'm not sure which ones.

Some 50/1.8 and 50/2 Takumars are also radioactive.

And here is a nice Rodenstock 75mm EL-Omegar at a super EL-Cheapo price and free shipping:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/12167911578...RK:MEBIDX:IT