Canon fd mount

[Isaiah Dominguez]

I was looking at maybe purchasing a zeiss lens for my Canon ae1 program is there any lens ,especially lens mount Adapters for FD mount you can recommend?

 

[neilt3]

If you had a Canon EOS camera , you could have got an adapter , but I'm not aware of one existing to mount Y/C lenses on an FD camera .
You might try do a search on if there is a Nikon F to Canon FD adapter , as Zeiss lenses were also sold in Nikon F mount .

To use Zeiss lenses , it would be far easier , and possibly cheaper , to buy a Contax 169 or similar , and use them on their native mount and retain all functionality .
Or even cheaper one of the C/Y mount Yashica SLRs .

EDIT ; or get a Nikon F mount camera , as AgX suggests , these modern Zeiss lenses are available in F or EF mount , but not C/Y mount , so it depends which Zeiss lenses your looking at .

 

[AgX]

Buy the Zeiss in Nikon mount and then try to find the Nikon-to-FD-body adapter. But then you still lack the automatic-diaphragm, not even to speak of shutter-priority automatisation.

I am a FD-guy myself. But as you explicetely hinted at the AE-1P, such mismatch with the above shortcomings makes not much sense to me. If you want the Zeiss lens for its optical perfomance, just buy for the price of that adapter a cheap Nikon body for that lens instead.

 

[AgX]

Lens design and manufacture have evolved since the days of the AE-1 and the decades after. Resulting in better lenses, at least MTF-wise.
We now either can buy such new lenses and apply one of the workarounds hinted at above, or we just stick to what we got.

 

[dynachrome]

I have many Canon manual focus film SLRs and many Canon FD and FL lenses. Certainly in the range of 28mm to 200mm lenses, the Canon FD models offer very high quality results. It's nice to know that lens test charts show some better lenses made much later and in different mounts. By the time you account for sample variation and consider how large your prints will be (if you make prints) any theoretical difference will become a very small practical difference. I have a number of overhauled Yashica FX-3 cameras and a nice collection of Yashica ML lenses. My only Zeiss lens in Y/C mount is a 35/2.8 AEJ. I wouldn't say the Zeiss lens is much sharper than the 35/2.8 ML but its out of focus rendition is more pleasant. If you get a Zeiss or Yashica camera and some Zeiss lenses, you will be able to see for yourself how they compare to equivalent Canon FD lenses. The later Zeiss lenses made in Nikon mount will cost a lot more but provide only marginally better performance and using them on a Canon camera with an adapter will be a frustrating experience.

 

[flavio81]

Lens design and manufacture have evolved since the days of the AE-1 and the decades after. Resulting in better lenses, at least MTF-wise.
We now either can buy such new lenses and apply one of the workarounds hinted at above, or we just stick to what we got.

Yes.

However i have a good collection of Canon FD lenses and the best of them are as sharp as I need them to be. 24MP scans of my neg show the film is more of a limitation than the lens.

 

[flavio81]

I was looking at maybe purchasing a zeiss lens for my Canon ae1 program is there any lens ,especially lens mount Adapters for FD mount you can recommend?

A Zeiss lens?

You mean a real, made in germany Zeiss lens, or a japanese-made "Zeiss"?

If you want a "real" Zeiss the only ones you can fit on a Canon FD camera are the east german Carl Zeiss Jena lenses in M42 mount. Some of them are very good, like the 35/2.4. Still, this lens isn't a better lens than the Canon FD 35/2 in its various incarnations, only smaller and lighter.

As for japanese-made Zeiss lenses, they're really good lenses however they're not superior to the very best of Canon FD lenses. Which is at the top of 1970s-80s (sometimes 90s) japanese optical quality, along with the very best of Nikon, Minolta, Pentax, and japanese-Zeiss.

I own many Canon FD lenses and can recommend any of the following as very good lenses:

24/2.8 SSC
28/3.5 FD
35/3.5 FD SC, later version (recognized by the beveled rear element)
35/2.8 FD New
35/2.0 FD, any version
35/2.8 Tilt-shift
50/1.4 FD, any version
50/1.2 FDnew
55/1.2 FD SSC
55/1.2 FD SSC Aspherical... if you can afford such a lens
85/1.8 FD, any version
85/1.2 FD (aspherical) if you can afford...
100/2.0 FDnew
100/2.8 FD, any version
135/2.5 FD SC
135/3.5 FDnew
135/2.8 FDnew
200/4 FD, any version
200/2.8 FDnew internal focus version (it has some chromatic abberrations, though, but they will only show on difficult subjects)

I have owned all the lenses listed above except for the two aspherical lenses listed and the 100/2.0.

All these lenses are very sharp and the lenses from 55mm onwards listed have really nice bokeh/rendering. The wideangles listed have no distortion except maybe for the 35/2.8 FDnew. However this lens is extremely sharp and inexpensive.

 

[Chan Tran]

I think it's better if the OP use a different body.

 

[Paul Howell]

It's hard to say without knowing which Zeiss lens you are thinking about. As already noted a C/Y mount, or a newer version. Zeiss makes lens for the EOS system in manual focus, expensive. There are several Zeiss to Canon adaptors on Ebay, not sure how well they work

https://www.ebay.com/itm/124420317832

 

[RDW]

Any adapted Zeiss lens, whatever the mount, will only give you stop-down metering with the AE-1P, which is a significant limitation, especially when there are many excellent FD mount lenses to choose from that will give you the full compatibility you are used to.

A Canon FD camera adapter for the Contax/Yashica mount lenses from the 70s & 80s does exist - I can see one on ebay at the moment (search for CY-FD/YC-FD). But personally, I would spend the money on something like a Contax 167MT, which can be had for not much more and will give you proper compatibility, including open aperture metering.

M42 to FD adapters are readily available, and give you access to the East German Carl Zeiss Jena lenses that were sold for Praktica bodies. Whether it's worth bothering with these instead of the many excellent Canon lenses is another question, but the adapter and some of the lenses (those that don't have cult status, anyway) are reasonably priced.

The modern Zeiss lenses for Nikon mount can also be adapted, as above, but to me it wouldn't make much sense to put such an expensive lens on a body that will have limited compatibility, when there are many inexpensive Nikon bodies available that will do a much better job.

 

[AgX]

M42 to FD adapters are readily available, and give you access to the East German Carl Zeiss Jena lenses that were sold for Praktica bodies.

The adapters I see offered at the moment do not offer an automatic diaphragm. But some M42 lenses yield a aperture-preset function.

 

[RDW]

The adapters I see offered at the moment do not offer an automatic diaphragm. But some M42 lenses yield a aperture-preset function.

Do any M42 adapters for any system offer open aperture metering? I know there were various methods for doing this with some of the original cameras, and their compatible lenses may have extra pins that can foul some adapters, but I haven't come across an adapter that allows anything other than stop-down metering on bayonet mount cameras.

 

[AgX]

I doubt there is any proprietary-M42 to alien body adapter. Even the other way round I know only one such adapter.

 

[dynachrome]

On the topic of M42 adapters, I have many of them. My favorite one is probably the Mamiya P Adapter for using M42 lenses on the Mamiya Auto XTL and Mamiya Auto X1000 cameras. While they do not allow for full aperture metering (stop-down metering is available), it provides auto diaphragm operation. Hand held picture taking with an SLR without auto diaphragm operation is a slow and annoying experience. Also, using an M42 lens with no Auto/Manual switch on a camera like a Canon FTb with an adapter confines the user to the maximum aperture. If I want to use an M42 lens with full aperture metering I will use a Pentax Spotmat F with an SMCT lens or a Mamiya DSX 1000 with an SX lens.