Old SLR lenses and mirrorless sensor size

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The_chief15

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Mark Hopkins
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I recently inherited an old SLR, Olympus OM-30, and a bunch of lenses. I'm considering picking up a used mirrorless camera to try the lenses with.

As the lenses were intended to be used with 35mm film is it best to look for something with a full frame sensor or will they work equally APS-C or M4/3?
 
They’ll work, they’ll just be cropped, for instance the 50mm will look like 50mm on the full frame, 75mm on APSC and 100mm on M43.

Depending on your lenses and your interests, there’s advantages / disadvantages in all 3.

What lenses do you have and what’s your interests?
 
As Phil says, with the smaller sensor sizes, you effectively get the look of a "longer" lens - but that also has the additional positive of using the centre of the lens's image circle - with older lenses, often if there were any issues with image quality fall-off, it'd be towards the edge of frame.

The Big problem really with APSC and especially with M4/3 is that if you're into landscapes and want wide angle lenses, you're basically going to be stuffed...Anything much wider than a 28mm from film days was considered quite a specialist tool - and a decent 17mm (effectively 35mm on m4/3 so not very wide at all) is probably as wide as you're likely to find, however, it'll probably be going for the same kind of money as a modern AF kit zoom...

So, for portrait stuff, a nice 85mm will be fantastic, and on M4/3 a 135mm is a very compact and light way to get some serious reach - a 200mm gets you well into the reach for wildlife - admittedly, you'll be looking at prefocussing probably to get a keeper - but it's a cheap way to go...

And, of course, for Macro, a good 50mm manual and some extension tubes (or even a bellows) can be absolutely amazing...
 
In terms of usage it would take over from my old bridge camera which is mostly used for landscapes while out walking and a bit of wildlife if I see something interesting.

The lenses I have are 50mm f1.8, 35-70mm f2.8-4, 80-205mm f4.5 macro, 75-150mm f4 telephoto.
 
I've used my film era lenses on my MFT cameras and also on my FF Sony A7 and I much prefer them on the A7.

Maybe you could see if the budget will stretch to a use Sony A7 MK1?

I use most of mine with Novoflex adapters which are quite expensive but I also have some cheap adapters bought off evil bay and to be honest they seem to work just as well.

Good luck with the lenses.
 
They will work fine on any mirrorless camera, with the caveat mentioned regarding focal length. However, you need to be aware that you will be focusing manually, so it’s better to get a camera with a large viewfinder. As a rule, the larger the format the better the viewfinder.
 
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