The Sub £50 Lens Guide

well i said i,m a complete novice who will be in this very nice appartment most of the next few years looking after our baby,the air con works great,its 32 degrees on balcony right now,and at 9.30pm i see the most beautifull view of the sun's reflections on the towers glass as it sinks lower in the sky.i am not one for watching movies in english over and over,and the spanish tv is painfull with my 50-60 words of spanish.so i,ve turned to photography,and after a few years i hope someone will actually tell me i,m good with a camera,but with my grey matter fading fast i wont hold my breath.

The 400mm shot looks sharp, but flat and you can't tell if it's atmospheric conditions or the lens that caused it.... probably a bit of both.

There's some purple fringing, but that could be the White Balance. It would be better set to Daylight not auto for these tests.

well its 800mm really,and the tripod is only a middlewieght,so i was pleased,but will keep playing,trying out any suggestions and hopefully improve shot,one thing i tried was tightening screws and nuts and bolts on tripod ,sure it helped.

Helios 77M-4 - reportedly has more resolution than the 44 series, and is 50mm f1.8 rather than 58mm f2. Lovely little lens - I suspect that my very, very poor MF skills are the limiting step here rather than its quality.

One note is that it doesn't have an auto/manual switch. The fix that had been done by the bloke I bought it from (superglue over the aperture pin to hold it down) gave way soon afterwards. A small piece of an AOL CD from a supermarket (they really are multi-purpose!), edges filed smooth and loctited into place, makes for a far more permanent fix

This is quite an interesting test and the 50mm Pentax came out best
Don't wast money on a 58mm Nokton

The page that relates to the test is quite old (2008 ) but is here some of the links no longer work.

Lenses tested:

Nokton 58mm f/1.4 made by Cosina
Helios-77M-4 50mm f/1.8
SMC Pentax-M 50mm f/1.7
Mamiya Sekor 50mm f/2

Pentax lenses always have been, and still are, amongst the best, regardless of price.

The guy that did the above tests on a K10D has some nice shots taken with various manual lenses on flickr link

The Nokton does seem to have very nice bokeh, it not a £50 lens though

Interesting, although I do question how the PF can go from bloody awful to non-existent just by stopping down the M 1.7 to f2. The Nokton also seems a lot worse than I would have expected, especially the terrible PF.

Sorry but I think the test is somewhat one dimensional.

In addition to sharpness, overall colour, contrast, rendering and bokeh are at least as important - and arguably the reason why people venture towards very fast primes in the first place.

The Nokton delivers superb images when judged against these criteria in the round.

That is not to knock the Pentax 50mm/1.7 lens - which I agree is excellent and superb value for money - but when you consider the overall look and tonality of the image, the Nokton offers a different look and is very impressive indeed.

If those tests had included a Pentax 50mm/1.4 compared to the 1.7, I suspect that the reviewer may well have reached the same conclusion.

PS - I have the Nokton and have never experienced that kind of fringing from it