Adapters for manual analog lenses: all mount types

Find your adapter

Adapters allow us to use, almost without restrictions, any vintage analog or digital lens on any camera body.

What is a lens adapter and what is it for?

Over the years, a host of cameras have been manufactured for very different purposes. The ones we are interested in here are cameras with interchangeable lenses, which, thanks to a mechanical interface called a mount, allow the use of different types of lenses. There are screw mounts with different diameters and pitches and bayonet mounts, of which there are also different types depending on the manufacturer.

Each mount has a name that tells us which lenses can be mounted on each body. Thus, if we have a camera with a micro 4/3 mount, we will need a lens with a micro 4/3 mount. And the same goes for Pentax K, Sony E, Nikon F, etc.

But what happens if we want to use a lens on a camera that belongs to another system? Well, this is where lens adapters come into play, which will allow us to use, almost without restrictions, any vintage analog or digital lens on any camera body.

In most cases, an adapter is a simple-looking plastic or metal tube. Its front side is designed to fit a lens from one system and its back side to fit a camera body from another system. At the same time, the length of the adapter must match the flange focal length of the system to which the lenses belong. However, things are not always that simple. You may already be wondering how a lens with electronic functions can communicate with the camera if there is a tube between them, or what results a full-frame lens will offer when your camera has an APS-C or micro 4/3 sensor. Bear with us, we’ll tell you about that.

In the case of mirrorless cameras, the flange focal length is usually much shorter than that of an SLR camera, so it is almost always possible to use an SLR lens on them. In general, the only obstacles we may encounter are: 1, the non-existence of the adapter we are looking for (due to the impossibility or difficulty of manufacturing it or due to lack of demand); and 2, the size of the image circle that the lens can produce, which may be excessively small. The most widespread mirrorless camera systems are Sony E, micro 4/3, Fuji X, Canon EF-M, Nikon Z, L-mount and Pentax Q, but there are more. If we have a camera belonging to one of these systems, it will be easier for us to start adapting lenses.

Among SLR body systems, the flange focal length can be very short, and adapters often look more like a ring than a short tube.

Types of adapters

Switching to another camera brand doesn’t have to mean replacing our entire arsenal of lenses.

Most adapters are quite affordable, ranging in price from $20 to $50. They have no electronic or mechanical contacts and do not include any optical elements. With one of these, your digital camera won’t know that a lens is attached and you’ll have to manually focus and adjust the aperture. Some cameras also have a feature that prevents them from shooting when there’s no lens attached, so you’ll have to turn this off.

But don’t be discouraged: even if lenses are fully manual, today’s digital camera bodies can still measure light and can be used in aperture priority mode to select the correct shutter speed. You’ll also still enjoy focus peaking (you’ll probably have to assign a function button to it and activate it manually for that) and Live View. It’s not as difficult as it may seem.

Adapting lenses with autofocus and other electronic functions

Many lenses from the 1990s and 2000s feature electronic components that are incompatible with cameras from other manufacturers. If you use them with a simple adapter, you may only be able to take advantage of some basic functions. However, there are other adapters that also convert electronic signals, and they are of course somewhat (quite a bit) more expensive.

Depending on the model, these adapters keep functions such as autofocus, optical stabilization, and aperture settings intact and operational. There is even an adapter capable of converting a manual focus lens to an autofocus one, but it is only available for certain camera and lens combinations.

Switching to another camera brand does not have to mean replacing your entire lens arsenal. Since major manufacturers such as Canon, Sony, Olympus, and Nikon began making mirrorless digital cameras, we have seen the emergence of many adapter manufacturers offering all kinds of combinations for attaching older SLR lenses to mirrorless systems.

Speed boosters

Speed ​​boosters (trademark of Metabones) are more sophisticated adapters with one or more glass elements. They can shorten the focal length of a lens, concentrate the light passing through them and project more light onto the sensor, allowing for faster shutter speeds. They can also override the crop factor of a non-full frame camera; that is, if you use a 50mm from a full frame system on a micro 4/3 camera with a focal reducer attached, you will still have a 50mm and not a 100mm.

Risks and drawbacks of using lens adapters

Even when an adapter is available, using an older lens is not always a good decision. A lens designed for analog film can have problems with resolution and overall image reproduction when mounted in front of a digital sensor.

Also, the image circle it offers may be too small, meaning that the lens was designed to project images onto a negative or sensor that is much smaller than your camera’s. In the worst case, the lens could physically damage your camera, for example by touching the sensor. This only happens with a small number of lenses that fit an adapter but are incompatible in design compared to the rest of the lenses in the system. In any case, if in doubt, it is best to search online for the exact combination you want to make and see if there are any documented problems.

Often, the adapted lens is larger than the native lenses on the mirrorless camera, but sometimes it can also be significantly smaller. It is common for the size of the lenses themselves to indicate the size of the image circle it can produce. For example, many C-mount lenses were designed for cinema cameras using narrow 8mm or 16mm film. When mounted on a full-frame digital body, they do not cover the sensor and produce a circular image at its centre; on a micro 4/3, this may be limited to more or less intense vignetting.

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