Are you familiar with this lens manufacturer?

[cichlid]

Hi All,

A friend of mine sent me this link for Russian camera lenses.
He doesn't own one so was not able to give me details on the quality.

Does anyone here happen to know anything about them?

http://top35mm.com/

Thank you

Erik

[Tringa]

I used a 58mm f2.0 Helios lens many years as they were the lens usually supplied with Zenit cameras.

A good lens as I recall, though it was a long time ago. Seems it is still well liked and not expensive.


Dave

[BobM]

The Helios 55mm and 58mm f/2 lenses were considered excellent value for money in film days. (The Carl Zeiss Jena factory was the Russian side of the Iron Curtain!). They're manual focus, naturally, and won't feed back aperture info to the camers.
How they hold up on, say, a modern Nikon FX dSLR, I don't know. My guess is that, for USD63 including shipping (about £42 paying by visa today) you could have a handy lens for the price of a Nikon lens hood!
When the Nikon 50mm f/1.8 (full auto) was around £80, I'd have said forget it. With the Nikon lens being the price it is today, well.......!
On an APS-C sensor, it looks like a 87mm, the sort of thing we used regularly for portraits in film days. For that use, the all-manual "feature" wouldn't be a problem.

[Inkanyezi]

They are all good lenses, but most of them are not suited for digital photography, due to insufficient AR coating. The problem is that the AA filter in digital cameras is highly reflective and causes flare when light is bounced back and forth between the lens and AA filter.