Carl Zeiss Jena DDR Sonnor 180mm f2.8 and the Fuji GFX 50s

When full frame mirrorless digital cameras started being manufactured a few years ago, it breathed new life into a vast amount of vintage film camera lenses.  This was expanded when Fuji released the affordable GFX 50s medium format mirrorless camera.  There are many pros and cons to using vintage lenses on modern digital cameras which I won’t go into here, but a separate post on that topic is coming.

One of these vintage lenses is the Carl Zeiss Jena DDR Sonnor 180mm f2.8.  The lens I tested has the Pentacon Six mount.  It is the most modern version of the lens, therefore it has multi coating.  The older versions only had a single layer or no coating.  This lens is considered by many to be the crown jewel of Pentacon 6 Carl Zeiss lenses and an amazing portrait lens.

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The new rise of mirrorless cameras has allowed many of us to dust off old vintage film camera lenses to use with modern digital cameras.  Until recently we were limited to full frame digital mirrorless camera bodies, but that all changed when Fuji released the medium format digital mirrorless camera in 2017.  This is very exciting because there is a whole untapped genre of vintage medium format lenses out there to potentially use.  There are many pros and cons to using vintage lenses which I won’t go into here, but a separate post on that topic is coming.Read More