Asahi Tele-Takumar 200mm f5.6 lens. I know, I know, not a lens that people think of first when they dream of beautiful negatives and high quality prints. Likely they don't think of it at all. But in this case there is some history that indicates there is at least a chance.
Years and years ago when I bought my first Pentax (a K1000 of course) from a pawn shop in Reno Nevada, the camera came with an SMC M 50mm f2 lens (what else) and a Tele-Takumar 200mm f/5.6 telephoto complete with the prerequisite Pentax M42 adapter. Now I was very, very, very poor at the time so these were my only lenses for a very long time. The 50/2 was my go to lens and the Tele-Takumar was only used when I absolutely could not walk closer to what I wanted to photograph. Needless to say, because I needed to be planning to use it in order to have everything I needed (adaptor, tripod, shutter release) the lens did not get used very often. Because of that f5.6 wide open aperture it was also a tad hard to focus. Eventually I traded it off at another pawn shop for a Vivitar zoom that did not get a lot of use either, but was easier to focus and did not require you to pre-set the aperture.
You would think that would have been the end of it...but it wasn't. I eventually started enlarging and printing some of my negatives and I found the the negatives from that unloved Takumar telephoto were actually very, very good. Great color and very sharp. They were so good in fact that I printed just about all of the few negatives I had from that lens. Of course by the time I figured this out I had traded it off long ago. I have no doubt that the quality of those old negatives were certainly due to the fact that the tripod and shutter release cable came our every time I used the lens, and of course I spent a lot of extra time making sure I was happy with the setup before I ever pulled the trigger on that shutter.
Long story short, I recently ran across another 200mm Tele-Takumar on everyone's favorite auction site and I bought it. Now I hope that the negatives from this lens are equal to the negatives from the previous one from so many years ago. I still own that same K1000 and I still own that old Pentax M42 to K-mount adaptor.
I am hoping that the same magic repeats itself.