Old to new lens adapters

Lackoffunding · Jul 12, 2007

Hello everyone,

I am a noob when it comes to this stuff, so please bear with me. I have a question regarding a lens adapter. I have a couple of old canon lenses that would cost me a fortune to replace as EOS lenses. I believe they are FD... all I know is that they were probably made in the late 70's/early 80's and include a 17mm wide angle, 15mm fisheye, and a 50mm 1.8. I would like to mount these lenses on my Digital Rebel, and I was wondering if this thing I found on ebay (http://cgi.ebay.com/Canon-FD-lens-t...8QQihZ019QQcategoryZ29971QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem) would work for my purposes.

thanks for the help!

Big Mike · Jul 12, 2007

It appears that it would work for your purposes...the issue then is quality. Because it has a lens element (to account for the extra distance the lens is from the camera)...the image quality is now subject to the quality of the lens in the adapter.

Back when Canon switched from FD to EF lenses, the made a limited number of their own adaptors...only avaliable to pro photographers who were heavily invested in FD lenses. Those are hard to find and expensive. This opened the door for the cheap ones...which are said to be of limited quality and therefore nor worth using unless you had some really nice FD glass.

The one in question says that it's good quality and better than the cheap 'Chinese' made ones...but who knows?

Also, I'm not sure what the procedure is for using the lenses. You might have to use 'stop down metering'.

There are some really cheap adaptors that don't have the glass lens element...but then you loose infinity focus...so why bother?

Here is a good resource... http://photonotes.org/articles/eos-manual-lenses/

n0ccj · Jul 13, 2007

Well, i actually bought one of these. It is ok but i do not use it because of the degradation of the picture. i ended up just buying the lenses i had in ef. i also did not how it felt on the camera. The canon ones are nice, i have seen them on ebay before but it is rare to find the real deal. and even then you will probably not be happy with the pictures after you see it.