Recently I was suddenly hit on an idea to buy some strange lens in some reasonable price. I was influenced a little bit by the one discussion thread on one of the traditional photography portal where someone asked about the photo quality of the Retina-Xenar lens. After some digging I found out some great portrait and landscape photos taken with that lens attached to Canon digital body. Quality of that lens must be great as the similar construction – Xenar with with light f:2,8 is mounted in high-end Rolleiflexes TLR cameras. I wonder what is the difference… maybe I’ll to find out it later.
Anyway, I found one on the ebay in UK, with DKL mount and I quickly decided to buy that lens. There were also two other lens available 35mm and 50mm f:1,9. Both were more expensive but still affordable, but I decided to go to the budget option and buy at first the lens f:2.8, which is considerably smaller – mounted on the DSLR body it looks like one of that modern pancake lens, but with shining silver you see at first glance that it must be something interesting attached to body. What is interesting the DKL-EOS adapter on local auction portal is more expensive that that lens. But after a short search I’ve decided to buy it on ebay from china for half the price with the postage included, besides adapters on ebay where made of brushed aluminium, and were shining with silver and those available here were black. You’ll how it look like when attached to body on the photos below.
Unfortunately I had no time for testing that lens yet – even though we had long weekend – unfortunately I’ve chosen different camera-lens configuration for the weekend. I hope to test this lens during the day, hopefully catching some sun rays with Xenar. For now I took only a few photos with that lens when going to work, in a hurry, during rainy, grey days. It’s attached to the old EOS 350d body which makes the focal length 80mm and with light 2.8 and maximum, very grainy 1600 ISO is hard to catch some great moments. I hope that lens will show it’s strength during daylight during some portrait session or some closer shots on the streets.
