A Forgotten Pentax Telephoto Lens

This spring I have decided to try longer focal lengths as I tend to photograph between 20mm and 80mm. You would be surprised how many genres of photography you can dabble with using 100mm or even 200mm lenses. I bet the first thing that comes to mind is wildlife photography or even portrait work. But telephoto lenses also have applications in macro photography, landscape photography, and even street photography.

The biggest benefit of adapting vintage telephotos lenses are their abundance and low cost on the used market. If you want to try out vintage telephoto lenses here are some things to expect. You will run into lenses that are prone to flare but this is easily corrected with a screw-on lens hood. Some vintage telephotos will have a built in hood or have special coatings to minimize this. Another thing to note is that some telephotos will have longer minimum focusing distances or even macro focus capabilities with magnification ratios.depending what decade you’re browsing from there are additional tech built into telephoto lenses that you have to take into account. These are important factors to understand in order to get the most out of adapting with longer focal lengths.

By now you might have caught on that I enjoy trying out the most cumbersome of setups just for the heck of it. That is why I am going to recommend a lens that has been long forgotten. Maybe for good measure but by my standards I see this as a gem.

Takumar lenses are some of the best and enjoyable vintage lenses that you’ll ever get to try. From the optics to the tactile design, I can recommend them all day long. My friend had mentioned to me that he bought a $60 Pentax Takumar SMC 200mm F4. That is a phenomenally good price for a Takumar lens, but this isn’t just a run of the mill lens. This 200mm is for the Pentax 67 system which uses 120 film that allows you to capture a 6x7cm frame. For the price of $60 you can buy a workhorse medium format telephoto lens that will outperform most vintage lenses of this focal length!

Of course this comes with the cost of having a minimum focus distance of 8.2ft and a focus throw of ‘forever’. However, what makes this lens optically better than other 200mm is the SMC in the name. This stands for ‘super multi coating’ and seven layers of it to be exact. Asahi Pentax at the time developed this technique to reduce flaring and improve contrast. An incredible and valuable feature for film lenses!

Caveats aside, this lens provided an enjoyable experience both on a GFX and an X mount camera that I used. For the work I did here, I adapted the lens to an X mount camera to get a cropped field of view equivalent to a 300mm. The lens still performs and behaves like a 200mm except you’re cropping into the lens’s image circle and getting all the center sharpness!

When using this lens you have to enable the depth of field preview switch to manual mode in order to control your aperture. I found that this lens performs best at F5.6 with it peaking at F8. The photos above were taken at F4 but I am very pleased with the results with a basic curves adjustment in PhotoShop. Despite the long throw in focus, It does help you fine tune the focus. Using this for wildlife photography will challenge your manual focusing skills but overall satisfying when you get the hang of it.

All in all, if you want a cheap and incredibly sharp vintage telephoto for your collection I highly recommend the Pentax Takumar SMC 200mm F4. My friend has the early version which features the classic industrial Takumar design. Although bulky, using medium format lenses give you the iconic 3D look and increible sharpness by default. When using them on a FF or APS-C sensor you get nothing but the center sharpness.