Pretty old lenses and a flasher

[jayaruwan]

hey, I'm new here. just joined. so I just bought my first DSLR. and I found my dad's old camera stash. these are the things I found there,

SMC Pentax-M 1:1.4 50mm
Minolta MD Rokkor 50mm 1:1.7
Minolta MD W.Rokkor 35mm 1:2.8
Yashikor AUX. Wide Angle 1:4

Sunpack Auto Zoom 3000

All the stuff are at least 25+ years old. I bought a MD to EOS converter from ebay, just to check out those old Minolta lenses (especially the 35mm lens. others are not in a very good shape.). does anyone here has first hand experience regarding something like this? if you do, I'd very much like to hear all about it.

and what's up with that wide angle "lens"? do you guys have any idea what it does or how to use it? I'm positive that it should be coupled with another lens.

also, there's this problem with the flasher. trigger voltage. most of the EOS cameras has a trigger voltage of 6. apparently this flasher's voltage is 245. although I've seen some people argue that the new EOS cameras support up to 250V. but it wouldn't be wise to connect the flasher directly to the camera via hotshoe. any ideas? buying a wireless trigger seems to be the only option.

[OsmosisStudios]

You can get a wireless trigger and use it off-camera manually or you can try a Wein Safe Sync hotshoe adaptor that will make it safe for use on-camera, if a bit unwieldly.

[jayaruwan]

Originally Posted by OsmosisStudios

You can get a wireless trigger and use it off-camera manually or you can try a Wein Safe Sync hotshoe adaptor that will make it safe for use on-camera, if a bit unwieldly.

thanks for the idea. I'll look into it too.

[inkista]

Originally Posted by jayaruwan

I bought a MD to EOS converter from ebay, just to check out those old Minolta lenses (especially the 35mm lens. others are not in a very good shape.). does anyone here has first hand experience regarding something like this? if you do, I'd very much like to hear all about it.

Sure. The converter you got should have some glass in it--if it doesn't, you will be able to mount your MD lenses, but they won't be able to focus to infinity, because the distance from the sensor to the mount flange on the old MD cameras was thinner than the EOS mount's. Pushing the lens out to a farther distance does the same thing extension tubes do. If you plan on only using the lenses for close work, this may not be a problem, but for landscape shooting, you're going to need a converter with the glass in it.

The problem is that the glass isn't likely to be of really high quality. And it's going to act like a teleconverter. So you're likely to lose some sharpness and max. aperture, and gain a little in focal length. Whether this is a problem or not is mostly a matter of personal taste.

You're going to lose all communication between the body and the lens. No autofocus. No aperture control from the camera. You'll only be able to shoot in M and Av modes. You'll control the aperture by the ring on the lens. And while you'll have metering, it's going to be a bit different from metering with an EOS lens: when you stop the lens down, your viewfinder will get darker and dimmer. Metering should remain accurate though.

You're also going to have some empty EXIF fields.

Other than that? It should work.

The wide angle thing sounds either like it's a filter for the front of a lens, or a tc on the back of the lens. Could be fun, but probably won't do much for your image quality.

[jayaruwan]

thank you very much for the detailed reply.

yes, I bought a converter with glass. the image quality might suffer. but I'm only going to use this until I buy a 50mm. still, with this 35mm lens, I gain a 56mm prime since the crop factor is 1.6

these are old manual focus lenses. they have dedicated focus and aperture rings unlike some new lenses with tiny focus rings. so it might not be a problem to focus manually.

this could prove useful for a beginner like me. when using this lens, I'm compelled to use manual mode. so I can get off auto mode easily

thank you very much again.

[inkista]

Yeah, I love using old converted manual focus lenses on my Canon.