I just stumbled across this topic and I realised that I do have some M42’s
They are all part of the camera that I got as a kid in the early/mid 70’s to learn: Asahi Pentax S1a
Question: I would love to try these and I know there are adaptors that allow me to use them with my current DSLR Nikon F-mount.
Anybody have experience with a particular adaptor brand/type?
I dont have actual experience but I know that it does not work well because you need an adapter with lens which decreases image quality. Afaik there are adapters though.
I am assuming that there will be (some) degradation, but you can buy simple and cheap ‘f-mount on one side and M42 on the other side’ adapters, but there are also those that have a (focusing) lens in the adapter.
simple: https://fotodioxpro.com/collections/nikon-f-adapters/products/m42-nik-v2
with lens: https://fotodioxpro.com/collections/nikon-f-adapters/products/m42-nikf-pro
I am curious if the lens version is actually worth it.
You only need an adapter with built-in glass in case you want to reach infinity.
Quote from the link above
Being disappointed with my initial results, I removed the infinity focus correction lens, and tried again. This time with spectacular results at Howard Peters Rawlings Conservatory. Except for the first one, all shots in this set are taken with the Helios 44-2 lens.
Believe it or not, but this is an M42 lens 
[adaptered onto a focusing helix, adaptered onto an EOS, adaptered onto a Fuji FX] .
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
Hi, I did not see this topic sooner but I have been shooting almost exclusively with old m42 lens for the past Five years +, first with the basic “spacer” adapter then with a focal reducer/speed booster from RJ-camera on a micro four-third sensor.
My favorites are (in order of preference) :
Yashica auto yashinon DX - 50mm 1.7 exceptionally sharp at the center even stepped down at 2.0 aperture and still rather crisp at 1.7. A little bit of swirly bokeh near the outer edges but past that
Yashica auto yashinon DX - 28mm 2.8 acceptably sharp, reasonable geometrical distortion and no major flaw. This is the lens I use most of the time. Practical, bought it to replace my broken auto pentacon 28 2.8 wich was sharper with very convenient close focus, but I never managed to buy exactly the same to replace it.
last Vivitar 1 70mm-210mm 3.5 A big and very impractical lens doing zoom and macro, rarely use it because it’s so big but it always gave me full optical satisfaction.
Wide open Yashica 50mm 1.7 (3 photos stitched together with hugin)
Yashida 50mm 1.7 (single shot with speed booster)
Yashica 28mm 2.8 (spacer adapter)
Vivitar 70-210 (spacer adapter) macro mode
Wow! Some people have ALL the luck!
Hope they will resell some to share the goodness !
They already have an eBay shop up and running. Unbelievable collection
A test shot from the very first legacy lens I bought off eBay — a cheap Soligor 35mm 2.8 — wide open in bright sunlight (I’ve no idea why; I just wanted to see what would happen — the shutter speed must have been somewhere around one billionth of a second 
).
I have (previously) read up on this and looked at the articles by Yannick Khong that you linked. I am still not convinced that the phenomenon exists, but I keep an open mind.
From a theoretical perspective: optical physics and engineering necessary for lens design are very well understood at this point. Lens designers can model their lens to a very high degree of accuracy with modern numerical methods, so lens design is a practical engineering problem with economic constraints, balancing manufacturing costs for a given tolerance, weight, size etc. Proponents of “microcontrast” can only make a convincing case for it by providing a theoretical basis and a way of quantifying it. Sure, that would require an MSc/PhD in physical optics, but there are a lot of people with those qualifications in photography. I have yet to see this (maybe someone did it but I missed it, in which case links are welcome; a quick lit search did not turn up anything).
Simply eyeballing images is not convincing. Very few of those “comparisons” post RAW images, so it is impossible to say how the image was processed. It could even be a camera JPEG, and then we are just comparing the processing engines manufacturers put on the chip.
Now the interesting question is: if there is such an effect, to what extent can it be adjusted with post-processing? Eg with the diffuse and sharpen or contrast equalizer modules of Darktable. Combined with masks, I find these very useful to enhance the perceptual depth of the image.
That said,
I wholeheartedly agree that the the emphasis on “sharpness” is not necessarily justified, especially for enthusiasts. It is easy to look at manufacturers promo images of some animal taken with a tele lens and imagine that I could take pictures like that… until I realize that a lot of work and preparation went into that photo. For the typical viewing resolution below 4k or a print size below 50cm, you won’t see the extra sharpness that cost thousands of euros in lenses. And sharpness in corners is not that relevant for most well-composed photography.
I fully understand why people love older lenses. A lot of love went into these lenses, and they have perfectly fine glass that lasts a long time. It would be a shame not to make use of them. It seems I could pick up decent M42 lenses for 10-40 euros, and with a reasonably cheap adapter have a lot of fun. And if I don’t like the lens that much, not a lot of money is wasted, I can even resell it with a minor loss.
I wasn’t suggesting you look at photographs on webs sites; I recommended taking your own comparison pictures with your own equipment, of the same subject under similar lighting.
As for modern engineering, fashions have changed dramatically: these days people want REALLY SHARP pictures, with saturated colours and lots of ‘pop’ — which is what your iPhone 14 will supply.
But, as I said to @pitbuster above, this discussion ‘only matters if you see a difference between photographs with digital and antique lenses. If you don’t, there’s no point wasting your time.’ People should do their own comparisons, and make their own minds up — which they will, anyway, I guess.
To be precise, the following have changed since the 1950s:
addressing trade-offs in software rather than in glass, the most dramatic of which is correcting distortions after the sensor has captured the image, made possible by MILCs in practice. Relaxing a constraint allows a better design for other aspects.
numerical methods and computational power; lens design software can now spit out all characteristics of a lens in less than a microsecond on a desktop.
new kinds of optics glass, each becoming cheaper to produce as time progresses (as happens with everything else).
The underlying principles haven’t changed, the physics has been known since the late 19th century.
I see a lot of differences, and I can totally get why people like the certain look that various lenses produce. Also, I think it is great that people can experiment with great M42 lenses for cheap. And last but not least, I think it is good that lenses which were designed and crafted very carefully don’t end up in a landfill — there is something very satisfying about that.
What I dislike is suggesting that there is an unquantifiable quality of lenses that people can perceive but not measure. That sounds a bit silly to me.
The “if you don’t see it, don’t participate in the discussion” kind of argument is something I have heard a zillion times over on audiophile forums. My problem with this is that even if I allow for the possibility that I am not perceptive enough, I imagine that if there is something so see, sooner or later someone will come along who can see it and have the skills/math/tools to quantify it.
A lot of clever people work on cameras and lenses. Suggesting that there is an effect but it is not quantifiable requires that the sets of “qualified” and “perceptive” people are disjoint. That I find hard to imagine.
That said, I don’t think one needs any kind of argument about “microcontrast” (as distinct from what is commonly understood as resolution) to love older lenses. We can just love them for what they are.
Queue people 90 years ago literally naming their photography group f64 because they wanted maximum focus and sharpness in their frame. Chasing sharpness is nothing new 
Group f/64 (Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, Ansel Adams and others) was formed in the early 1930s, following on from, but long after, Alfred Stieglitz and F. Holland Day’s Photo-Session movement had led the reaction, in America, against the soft-focus, misty ‘artistic’ style of the Pictorialists who had been the vanguard of the effort to get photography accepted as art (and not merely a technical expression of the sciences of optics and chemistry).
So the enthusiasm for ‘sharpness’ came after decades of artisitic photography that had no interest in it. But as Modernism started to make ‘sharpness’ fashionable in the early decades of the 20th century, the single-minded persuit of pin-sharp crispness started to displace any other basis for valuing photographs. So much so that Henri Cartier-Bresson was prompted to issue his famous waspish rejection of the obsession with sharpness (as well as taking a swipe at the Picorialists for their obsession with the lack of it). Cartier-Bresson wrote:
“I am constantly amused by the notion that some people have about photographic technique — a notion which reveals itself in an insatiable craving for sharpness of images. Is this the passion of an obsession? Or do these people hope, by this trompe l’oeil technique, to get to closer grips with reality? In either case, they are just as far away from the real problem as those of that other generation which used to endow all its photographic anecdotes with an intentional unsharpness such as was deemed to be ‘artistic’.”
[ from “Images à la Sauvette”, 1952 — known in English as “The Decisive Moment”)
This to-ing and fro-ing is what I meant by changes of ‘fashion’ in photography: a matter of photographic practice and style, not changes in the engineering and technology of equipment.
That was my first lens! On a barebone ZENIT SLR, not this one but without even the light meter…
Something I have noticed is that the ‘shortcomings’ of some modern lenses are corrected for by the camera software rather than being corrected for by lens optics. Whilst this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it can sometimes be a pain if you shoot RAW. When I first loaded up my Fuji XC 35mm 2.0 RAFs into RawTherapee, I was horrified by some of the shots. 
This is why we need to demand openness from manufacturers.
Nikon has some in-file lens correction stashed in the maker notes… But its just a string of numbers and who knows what those numbers mean. I’d love to have the lens correction module read and apply these values.
Me [innocently]: Are you a married man? If so, how did you “quantify” your partner?
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
