Home / General Discussion

Is it worth it to use really old lenses with a new dSLR?

#1

Nov 24, 2006 8:19 PM by bwillet

Hi all! In high school my wife was really into photography, and she is expressing a lot of interest in getting back into the hobby. I'd like to get her a nice but consumer level dSLR (maybe a Nikon D50/D40, Canon Rebel XT/i, etc.) My wife used her father's old Minolta SLR and really enjoyed using his VERY LARGE assortment of Rokkor lenses, which she just found out that he will give her if she wants them. We don't know anything about the lenses other than there are more than 10 lenses running the gamut of types, so if they can be used with a new camera that would give her a lot of flexibility. Even if they can be used, I would assume at least some of the camera's advanced functions can't be used? I'm going to do more research after posting this, but wanted to get some opinions to point me in the general areas of "do it", "don't bother", or even "sell the lenses and buy good ones".

Thanks for your input!

Reply
#2

Nov 24, 2006 8:30 PM by JimC

Unfortunately, you can't attach those old Rokkors at all without some kind of adapter (which have drawbacks). It's a physically different lens mount than any current camera model uses, digital or film.

Minolta abandoned the MC/MD manual focus lens mount 21 years ago in 1985 when they introduced the world's first body integral Autofocus SLR (the Maxxum 7000).

Quote:
However, a relatively low profile Minolta rocked the entire photographic community in January 1985 with a new breed of AF camera which has a revolutionary concept that made it differed from other "mainstream industrial design" adopted by other makers. "New" because there were two major factors of which one of them has a great impact to the existing Minolta users - the Company decided to drop support for the older MC/MD mount and replaced with an fully electronic lens mount with no backward compatibility.

http://www.mir.com.my/rb/photography...um7k/index.htm

Any Minolta Autofocus Lens (a.k.a., Minolta AF, Maxxum, Dynax, Minolta A-Mount) will work on a Konica Minolta (or now Sony) DSLR.

But, Minolta Manual Focus lenses use a different lens mount.

There are some adapters available, and you'd probably want to buy one of the third party focus screens and install it, too (modern DSLR viewfinders are not the best for manual focus). ;-)

Adapters have drawbacks (for example: you'll need one with optical elements providing more magnification in order to focus to infinity with resulting loss of light, you'll need to meter stopped down since the camera won't know that a lens is attached).

If I were going to buy an adapter, I'd probably go with one with less magnification (the original Minolta MC/MD to Maxxum Adapter had the equivalent of a 2X TC built in).

If you use one without optical elements, you won't be able to focus to infinity using an adapter.

But, there are some third party adapters with less magnfication (and resulting loss of light) available on the market. Some Konica Minolta DSLR owners are using adapters with 1.2 to 1.4x magnification (so loss of light would be far less than the2 stops you'd losewith theMinolta adapter).

Here is a 7 page forum thread where you may find some useful information,discussing pros and cons of both TCs and Adapters.

http://www.dyxum.com/dforum/forum_po...=2100&PN=1

Scroll down past the discussion on TCs, and you'll see a Manual Focus Lenses Section discussing adapters that you could use for mounting them on a Konica Minolta (now discontinued) or Sony DSLR (one so far, the Sony DSLR-A100).

Reply