Pentax 50mm f2 Vintage Lens With Modern Mirrorless Cameras

Classic Pentax 50mm f2 Vintage Lens

Modern mirrorless digital cameras gives us the ability to use almost any vintage camera lens through the use of adapters.  Some of these lenses are better than others, and some are just flat out amazing due to their unique image qualities.  The Pentax 50mm f2 vintage lens is an extremely budget friendly lens with decisively divided camps of those who love this lens and those that don’t.  Therefore, I was very excited to try this lens out and see how it performed on my Sony A7 II full frame mirrorless camera.

The viewpoint of this review is based on the real world experience of using this lens mounted on the Sony A7 II camera for everyday photography situations.  This is not about MTF charts, perfect scenarios in the studio, etc.  I want to provide a review of how my lens copy handled while using it.

Pentax M Lenses

The Pentax M series lenses were the second generation of Pentax K-mount lenses.  these lenses are typically smaller than their original K-series counterparts and are compatible on the Pentax K-mount film and digital cameras.  These lenses are maanual focus and do not have electronics in them.  This makes them have less things to break and be very compact in size.  f you want to learn more about the Pentax K series lenses visit the Wiki Pages HERE.

Lets get into the lens review.

The Lens –

The Pentax 50mm f2 lens was manufactured between 1979 and 1985 with two different versions. The earlier version was with a metal barrel with a later version with a plastic barrel. My version is the plastic barrel, and this lens is completely manual. The SMC coating on this lens was first introduced in 1971.   The SMC coating is a big part of the reason why Pentax lenses have such a huge cult following. The lens is super compact and even with the plastic barrel, it has a solid feel and good build quality. My version has a very smooth focusing ring. The aperture clicks accurately and feels very solid, especially for a lens with this much age on it.

Did I mention this 50mm lens is budget friendly? I mean really budget friendly. Looking around on the internet, I found this lens in excellent condition for as little as $30 and I found ugly but usable lenses for as little as $9.  I got my copy of this lens out of a grocery bag full of vintage lenses that I only paid $18 for entire bag.

Size And Feel –

This classic Pentax is super compact and lightweight compared to more modern lenses.  A lot of this is due to the lack of electronics, auto focus motors and the f2 design.  Since this lens is f2, it is not as fast as other vintage lenses like the 1.4s, but that means this lens is very small.  The size of this lens makes it easy to carry it around without looking conspicuous or standing out .  This is really important if you plan to use this for things like street photography or other types of photography you want to really blend in with a crowd.  It makes this lens easy to stash in a small section of your camera bag, or a lens that is easy to carry around on your camera all day.  The lens is all metal construction so it feels substantial in your hand.

Lens Operations –

My 50mm example has a very smooth and easy to operate aperture ring that clicks into place to avoid it moving on you while you are out shooting. The focusing ring is easy to grip and glides so smoothly. As a result, the manual focusing is quick and easy.  This lens has the legendary SMC coating and other than shooting straight at the sun it worked very well.

As with all these vintage lenses, the Pentax 50 f2 is all manual.  This eliminates these lenses for many people before they even try them.  For those of us that don’t mind manually focusing and controlling the aperture, this can actually be a joy.  I use manual focus a lot for my photography, so it does not bother me in the least.  The focusing throw is long and smooth, and even better than a lot of modern lenses. 

Quick Specs

• 49 mm filter ring
• 31mm (1.5 inches) in length
  
• Minimum focusing distance of 45 cm (1.5 feet)
• Weight is 160 grams (0.35 lbs)

This lens feels solid and even though it is the plastic version it feels like a good quality lens in my hand.

Mounted To The Modern Sony A7 II Mirrorless Camera –

An adapter is needed to mount the vintage lenses to the modern, mirrorless, digital cameras, like the Sony A7 Series Cameras.  Given that there are no electronics, almost any adapter can used to to mount the lens to the Sony mirrorless camera.  This camera/lens combination is great for a lot of different types of photography, and I found it a great combination to walk around in areas where you don’t want to attract attention to yourself.

How the Pentax Lens Performed –

The image quality of the 50mm f2 completely surprised me.  The images are sharp, have good contrast and generally have that vintage look to them.  As you can see in the images below the Pentax 50mm f2 shows up very well.  For the price of this lens this the images are great. 

See here this image right before sunrise, the landscape is sharp and the colors have a great vintage feel to them.

 

The image below is a great example of how well this vintage lens performs.  The still life shot shows the sharpness and detail you can get with the 5omm f2 M lens.

Pentax 50 mm f2 M A Multi-Purpose Lens –

Given the flexibility of this focal length the 50 f2 is really good general purpose Swiss Army Knife of lenses kind of lens.  While I was testing this lens, I just kept finding new ways this lens just worked as I spent more time shooting with it.  Whether it is walking around, street photography, portraits, cityscapes, or landscapes, I can really see a use for this lens.  This normal lens did truly feel natural in field of view when I was out shooting and composing images.

The Pentax 50mm f2 is truly a good choice as an all purpose walk around lens, especially if you are on an extreme budget.  It is compact and discreet mounted on the Sony A7II which makes it great to use in places where you don’t want to draw attention to yourself.  It’s a lenss camera combination that is easy to carry around all day given it’s light weight for a full frame camera set up.  I was able to take landscape images just as easy as portraits, and still lifes. 

The SMC Pentax 50mm f2 For Portraits –

When I think about shooting portraits, I generally reach for an 85mm or 135mm lens when shooting with the full frame Sony A7 II.  These focal lengths are famous for their portrait looks and abilities.  Therefore, how does this 50mm lens handle portraits? 

This lens surprised me here and I would not hesitate to use this lens for portraits at all.  The below image shows just how good this lens does for portraits.  This portrait was spontaneous and using natural light (Thank you Teale Hatheway for letting me interrupt you while working).  The natural light was a little harsh which led to a super moody portrait.  Even though this lens is only f2 I was able to get good separation from the background of the image.

Color –

The colors produced by the Pentax 50mm f2 and Sony A7 II are really good.  I was really impressed with the quality of the color right out of the camera and the vintage look of the images.  This image below shows the colors right out of the camera.  It is also a great example of shallow focus of this lens even though it is only f2.

 

Below is another image that shows off the color achieved by this lens, camera combination.  The high desert in bloom was a great opportunity to test the color this lens produces.  These colors are very representative of what the scene looked like while I was there. 

 

Some Things That Weren’t Great –

There is a lot to like about this vintage 50mm, but no lens is perfect. This holds true about the Pentax 50mm f2 mounted on the Sony A7 II.  For the price this lens has a lot going for it, but with budget prices come trade offs.  therefore, lets talk about some of downsides of this lens.

Images Can Be Flat –

This did not really surprise me based on cost of this lens.  The contrast is just not as good as some of the other 50mm lenses I’ve tested.  Therefore, sometimes the images are just a little flat.  This image is out of the camera not edited to give some perspective.  Even with editing though there isn’t a lot of improvement, the image just starts looking digital and loses the vintage feel.

 

The Bokeh –

Bokeh can make or break an image, especially when you start taking images with really shallow depth of field.  Bokeh is the soft out-of-focus blur of the back ground when you are using a very fast lens.  Different lenses have different bokeh characteristics based on how they are made, and this is a very non-technical, artistic area of photography.  Therefore, what I say next is just my opinion based on my aesthetic and others might have a completely different opinion and I’m quite alright with that.

Given that this lens is only f2 the bokeh is very limited compared to faster lenses.  Therefore if you are looking for lots of soft bokeh this is probably not the lens for you.  The paint palette image shows that the lens can achieve a soft background. It just is not close to an f1.4 or f1.7 lens.

The Size With The Adapter –

This really surprised me since the Pentax 50mm is so compact.  After I put the adapter on it though, it was no longer much smaller than some of the other 50 1.4 lenses I shoot with regularly.  In the image see the comparison to the Carl Zeiss 50mm f1.4 and the Canon 50mm f1.4.  This made me really think about how much the adapter added to size of this super compact vintage lens.  There is no way to adjust though, because the distance has to be accounted for so the lens is the correct distance from the sensor of the A7II.

None of these issues will stop me from using this lens.  It’s important to point out the flaws I encountered though.  Photographers know everything is about trade offs and balance when it comes to gear.  Consequently, it is good to know what gear is good for what situations.

Conclusion –

Pros

• Budget!  This lens is priced right and ready available.
• Image quality is really good especially when you stop this lens down to f4.
• The lens is extremely versatile for many types of photography.
• The multicoating is really impressive especially in a less than $30 package.

Cons

• f2 is slow when you’re used to faster lenses and makes low light photography tricky.
  
• The moderate contrast was not super inspiring.
  
• All manual.  Focusing, aperture all done manually.

Final Thoughts –

I found the Pentax 50mm f2 M mounted to the Sony A7 II to be a good lens/camera combination.  It was compact and easy to carry around all day. 

The images this lens produces have a vintage character , which is the reason to shoot with a vintage lens.  It brings a lot to the table in terms of creating images that don’t look like they were shoot with modern digital lenses.

After shooting images with this lens for a bit, I found myself liking it more and more.  Given that it was a lens from a bag of lens, I think this is a great vintage lens.  If you are wanting to try out vintage lenses on you modern mirrorless camera, or just add a new lens to your vintage collection, it’s hard to go wrong with this super budget friendly lens.

If you like prime, normal focal length lenses check out the Carl Zeiss Jena Biometar 80mm f2.8 for medium format cameras.

Maybe you are looking for a longer telephoto lens.  If so, check out the blog post about the Canon 500mm FD Lens.

Additional Images –

 

 

 

Don’t forget to look at the images on my site in the galleries starting at: https://mjvphoto.com/the-art/.  Hopefully you find some of them inspirational for your own photography adventures, or maybe you find an image you want to call your own.