Buying Vintage Lenses on eBay: Six Months of Notes, Mistakes and Keepers
Started this as a cheap way to get fast glass. Ended up with a small box of metal cylinders, a working knowledge of Russian aperture rings, and opinions.
Here’s what I learned paying for it.
Read the seller’s photos, not the seller’s words
“Clean glass” means nothing. Every listing says clean glass. What tells you something is the picture where the seller shines a light through the lens from the back. If they didn’t take that picture, ask for it. If they won’t, move on. There are eleven thousand of these things for sale.
Haze looks like a faint milky wash across the element. It kills contrast and sometimes cleans out easily, sometimes doesn’t. Fungus looks like tiny branching threads, like frost on a window, and it spreads. I bought one with fungus because the price was silly and I told myself I’d clean it. It’s still in the box. Don’t be me.
Oil on the aperture blades is the common one. The blades look wet and shiny and the aperture closes slowly or sticks half open. Sometimes it’s a twenty minute fix if you’re willing to open the front group. Usually it’s a reason to pay less or walk.
Prices
The famous names cost what the famous names cost, because everyone watched the same video. The bargains are one step to the side. A slightly less celebrated focal length from the same maker in the same era with the same coatings will often be a third of the price and indistinguishable in an actual photograph.
Japanese sellers were consistently the most accurate about condition in my experience. Grading is conservative, packing is excellent, and the listings tend to describe defects honestly. Factor in the wait and possible customs on your end.
Adapters
Get the dumb kind with no glass in it, for anything where the flange distance allows. Adapters with a corrective element in them are for mounting long flange lenses on short flange bodies, and they cost you sharpness. Most old glass on a mirrorless body needs nothing but an empty tube with the right mounts on each end.
Cheap adapters are mostly fine. The failure mode is play, a tiny wobble that shifts your focus plane. Grab the lens and try to rock it. If it moves, it goes back.
Focus peaking plus magnification is the whole workflow. Wide open at f/1.4 on a manual lens, the depth of field is thin enough that you will miss unless you punch in. I miss anyway. Shoot three.
The keepers
The Helios 44-2 for the swirl, obviously, which is a defect everyone now pays for. Works on faces against busy backgrounds and looks silly on anything else. Cost less than lunch.
An old 55mm f/1.8 that came out yellow from the thorium in the glass. Left it on a windowsill facing the sun for a few weeks and most of the tint went. Renders beautifully now, warm and slightly soft wide open, sharp by f/4.
A 135mm that I bought for almost nothing and use more than anything else. Long, slow to use, and the compression on a crop body is lovely.
What I’d tell someone starting
Buy one. Not four. Use it for a month before you buy the next one, because half the appeal is the constraint, and the constraint doesn’t work if you’ve got a bag of options.
And accept that some of these are going to arrive stiff, dusty, and smelling like a cupboard from 1974. That’s part of it.