This Tamron SP 24-48mm f/3.5-3.8 lens is a really great lens in every way and can even be adapted to almost any SLR camera mount with the use of their Adaptall 2 mounts. The most trouble you will have with this lens is finding one with the original front lens cap and the front element not all scratched up.
I feel bad for the people who bought their nice new Ricoh camera with this Ricoh Riconar 55mm f/2.2 kitted with it. This lens is very poor. However if you want some strange and artsy spherical aberration, this lens is interesting to play with.
This little Chinon 50mm f/1.7 Auto is a pretty decent lens with really great build quality and just works well.
This old Soligor 28mm f/2.8 Wide-Auto is a decent little lens for it’s day. It can produce some decent photos stopped down but it’s not worth getting too excited over.
Super sharp, great color, amazing contrast and built like a tank, this Nikon 60mm f/2.8 Micro D lens is definitely worth looking for if you don’t mind the short 60mm focal length.
The Mamiya Sekor 35mm f/2.8 is a nice little M42 lens suitable for landscape photography. It is also very sharp stopped down. Having the M42 mount is really nice because it can mount on almost any Digital SLR with an adapter ring easily found on Ebay!
Being extremely well built and with great ergonomics, this Leica R Summicron-R 50mm f/2.0 Leitz is a great lens. Plus it is built in Canada! Woo Hoo!! However I am not fully convinced it is worth the money they are fetching for today.
This Nikon Nikkor 28mm f/2.8 Ai is a lens definitely worth looking for! With a cheap Ebay adapter it can be put on many DSLR’s. The lens produces amazingly sharp images. Most people want the Ai-s version but miss out on the optics of this amazing lens making it a very cheap 28mm 2.8! The focus is absolutely amazing and everything works great.
There are a few versions of this lens but the 6/6 element Pentax Takumar 135mm f/2.5 SMC is an outstanding portrait lens and built like a tank. Look around and you might find one!
There are thousands of lenses out there in many different mounts and variations that are still compatible for digital cameras.
As far as 3rd party lenses, many of them are not very good. However there are a few gems out there that are optically equivalent or even superior to pro modern lenses today. There are many that simply have not been reviewed before or discovered. My goal is to hunt a few of them down, review them and make these gems known.
There are also some lenses that we know are good but when we investigate a side by side comparison there are no actual photos displaying an optical comparison. My hope is to compare a couple of them side by side. A VS comparison which we all love!
