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 
).
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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,
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 
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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.
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That was my first lens! On a barebone ZENIT SLR, not this one but without even the light meter…
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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.
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Me [innocently]: Are you a married man? If so, how did you “quantify” your partner?
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
I just wanted to add, however, that this is why I love RawTherapee sooo much — thanks to a combination of a custom Lensfun LCP and the manual chromatic-aberration module, I’m able to handle all the craziness the lens can throw at me. I know I keep saying it over and over again, but it’s true: RawTherapee is just amazing!
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I took this photo with a Helios-44-2 lens taken from my father’s old film camera.
It was my first lens with f2 and it was eye opening. Maybe it is not as sharp as a modern lens, but the results can be beautiful + you cannot beat the price.
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That seems very sharp for the Helios.
I found helios to be a good deal, not exceptionally sharp for sure but not too much annoying defects (huge halos or chromatic aberration)
The sharpness issue can be somewhat mitigated in post 
I had the same experience when switching from kit lens to an Helios, really sparked my interest in photography. I think camera manufacturers should include a cheap, bright mechanical lens instead of a dark zoom as the kit lens, specially nowadays with competition from “phones” (not really a phone anymore when it has 3 lenses).
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My genre of choice is street photography. In our world, we don’t do ‘sharp’ — a lot of the time, we don’t even do ‘in focus’ (or ‘colour,’ for that matter).
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Helios 44M-4, developed in RawTherapee-5.9dev, ladenoise_improv-release branch.
Model = Pentel Graphgear 1000 mechanical pencil for 0.4mm lead.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
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I raise your Helios shot sheep with this one
This is a small breed (Ouessan’s sheep)
Shot on a full frame camera with a Yashica DX 50mm 1.7
The crop is the full width** left part of the frame (so you have corners) and it was probably shot @ F2.8
Compared to the Helios 44-m-2 I own, the Yashica is sharper at compares aperture and event stepped down to f1.7
Although it can exhibit swirly bokeh in certain condition and is prone to lens flare, the quality of the images is rather good and almost consistent right to the corners of the frame.
Short version : I really like this lens
**Edit : full height
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