There’s a lot of talk of Takumars and old Pentax-lenses. Old ones can go for quite a lot of money sometimes. So what’s so special about them? I got a 35mm (maybe not the most famous of the Pentax-lenses, but still…), lets find out how they work.

The purchase
I purchased this lens from a friend on the net for 200 swedish kronor (about 20€). He keeps nagging about these Super Takumars, so I wanted to see what all the fuzz was about ;) He said the lens was worn, but it was just some external colour disappeared, everything else feels very good. Most of the time, the Pentax lenses go for some money both in Sweden and on ebay.

The lens
Pentax Super Takumar 35mm/3.5, has a M42-mount so for my Canon EOS 350D I’ve used an adapter. The build quality is extremely nice, and feel in the focusring is charming. The aperturering clicks in to it’s values, which is a good thing because with this one I think it’s really important to use stop-down metering.

Results
The bokeh is good, one details is that the flares are not round. But otherwise soft, pleasant bokeh. The colours feel very saturated and nice, rich. I had a hood on the lens when I took the images below, not a Pentax hood but a rubber hood in the filtermount. I think you can get sharp images, but some pictures I’ve taken feels soft in a positive way. I should mention that I don’t often work to get sharp images, it’s not often a very important criteria for me (as you might have noticed a lot of my images play with fog, light and such).

I really like some of the images I’ve taken with this lens since I got it, offcourse it’s not all down to the lens but it means something when you got a lens you feel comfortable with. It’s actually my first 35mm prime along with the Yashica ML 35mm f2.8 (which I’m also testing at the moment).

Images

Pros

• Great build quality
• Can be sharp, can be soft (control with f-stop)
  
• Ok bokeh
• Nice, saturated colours
• Feels really nice to use, fantastic feeling in the focusring :)

Cons

• Not round flares (not round aperture), if you like that sort of thing
• Can be a bit hard to find the right focus

Reading
Opinions from the Pentax Forums users.
There’s a lot of links if you search Google. If you have ideas please suggest them in the comments to this post :)