Got one! Thanks all for looking.

just a brief observation: mayfair sankor sounds like mamiya sekor.

i suspect that was probably done on purpose. the mamiya 50/1.4 in m42 is a beaut.

personally, i feel the extra price of the k5 is worth it. that extra dr would be great, and the high iso is the icing on the cake.

but it depends on your budget.

if you are in two minds, i'd just go for one, then justify the purchase by taking lots of pictures.

right. i'm stepping up the budget. does anyone have an fa 50/1.4? that i might buy? i'd be looking for a copy for 200 gbp. i'm off work next week, so i can meet you almost anywhere in central london if you want to do cash in hand.

thanks!

yep, that would be my first choice, actually. it'd be nice to keep to the 49mm thread, whereas the k-version is 52mm.

i'd also rather not deal with m42 adapters at the moment. but i'll probably grab a genuine one at some point. the ebay ones have me paranoid about destroying my mount when i take 'em off!

but 99 gbp is a bit steep for the m-version, no?

ok, i'm willing to broaden my scope to any k-mount manual 1.4 standard prime. if you have one knocking about, i promise to give it a good home!

Hi all,

I'm on the lookout for a 50/1.4 Pentax-A.

If you have one going, please do let me know.

Thanks!

it is quite a fun little lens. i paid 35 euros for it (30 gbp), and got it from a dutch seller of nightscopes (http://www.erebus-nachtzicht.nl/)

also available on these nightscopes is the cyclop 85/1.5, which is basically the helios 85/1.5, but without an aperture.

some of the nightscopes also come with the standard helios 58/2.

you have to be careful with the russian nightscope lenses, because some of them have protruding back elements which prevent you from mounting them.

right, well i don't satisfy the 10 quid mark, but i guess the point of the thread is exotic lenses.

this is a lens made for a russian nightvision scope, which very conveniently takes m42 threaded lenses:



i make it roughly a 100mm f/2 lens by guesstimating. it doesn't have an aperture.

what's interesting about the lens is the ridiculous amount of field curvature. the edges can be completely out of focus, while the centre can be relatively sharp:







make of that what you will.

yeah, i reckon the voigtlander 125mm is probably the best lens around at this price.
[quote="Anvh"]btw. Bokeh is not really influenced by longitudinal chromatic abberration but by spherical aberration. And sadly the smooth bokeh is actually caused by not correcting it well, if you've smooth bokeh in the background you have hard bokeh in the foreground and vice versa.[/quote]while smooth bokeh does arise from under-correcting spherical aberration, longitudinal ca also has an important effect; if you imagine that your out of focus highlights have green edges on them, they will not blend into each other so well if the highlights themselves are not green.