Are other Helios lenses as good as the 44m ?

[BADGER.BRAD]

I use now and again a Helios 44m lens on my Sony a6000 but as crop factor makes this a 80mm (ish) lens I wondered if any of their 28mm lenses are any good ?

 

[BADGER.BRAD]

??

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

Helios was originally the name given to the Soviet copy of the Carl Zeiss Biotar 58mm design and later used for other designs.

As was too often the case with Soviet products, what you got largely depended on luck and ranged from excellent to apalling. This page provides more information...

Helios (lens brand) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[BADGER.BRAD]

Thanks Andrew , My father was fascinated by things Russian. When I was a kid in the middle of the cold war it used to baffle me that such things were so commonly available considering the general hatred of the nasty Russians. The Helios lens I have came from one of his Zenit cameras and really impresses me compared to the few modern lenses I have tried, it's a shame that it ends up being 80mm due to the crop factor on APS-c.

 

[swanseamale47]

Pentax did a screw 28mm Takumar if I remember rightly that was pretty decent. Tamron also did the adaptal 2 which was very good, I still have mine (they did a 24mm too) both could be had with the screw changable mount.

 

[AndrewFlannigan]

Tamron also did the adaptal 2 which was very good,

I would use the word "excellent".

I still have a set of the AD2 SP lenses, which work very well on both my Canon film bodies and my Nikon digital,,,