Canon New FD 24mm f/1.4L

Nikon never built a 24mm faster than f/2 in the manual-focus era. Canon built this. That single stop is the whole reason the New FD 24mm f/1.4L existed and the reason it still trades for serious money on the used market. A photojournalist on Kodachrome or pushed Tri-X, working a dim interior at 24mm, could either stop down to f/2 on a Nikkor or open all the way up here and keep shooting. For a lot of people that decided which system they carried.

It is a retrofocus wide, which it has to be to clear an SLR mirror, and Canon went after the usual penalty of that layout (soft corners, sagittal coma on bright points) with a ground aspherical element. That is what the L meant before marketing diluted the badge: real exotic glass solving a real problem. Wide open at f/1.4 the center is genuinely usable, not just an emergency setting, with the corners catching up by f/2.8 and everything biting hard by f/5.6. Coma is better controlled than you expect from a fast wide of this vintage, but do not pretend it is gone. Shoot a streetlight or a star at f/1.4 and you will still see some smear in the corners. It cleans up fast a stop or two down.

Color is the cool, slightly contrasty New FD signature, and flare resistance is good for a fast wide of this era as long as you respect the front element. Bokeh is not the point of a 24mm, but the out-of-focus rendering behind a close subject is smooth rather than nervous, and the focus falloff at f/1.4 gives you that wide-angle environmental portrait look where the subject sits inside a softened context rather than cut out from it.

Who actually used it: reportage and documentary shooters who needed one fast wide for available-light work, plus the night crowd who valued every bit of that aperture. It is not a landscape specialist the way a slower, sharper 24 might be. You buy this for the speed and the low-light envelope, not for f/11 detail charts.

The honest weakness is field curvature. Focus on a flat subject at the edges and the plane bows toward you, so corner sharpness on architecture or copy work wide open is softer than the center suggests. Stop down and it tightens, but if your job is flat reproduction this is the wrong tool. Mount-wise the FD register works in your favor on a mirrorless body: a plain dumb adapter and no glass gets it onto a modern sensor, which is one reason these stay in use. Putting one on a DSLR is the awkward case, since that needs a corrective optical element.

Practical note for shooting it open: at f/1.4 your meter is integrating a lot of light from a wide field, and an in-camera average will happily blow a bright window behind your subject. Spot the actual subject. Zone Light Meter lets you meter that low-light interior off the face or the shadow you care about and place it where you want it, which matters far more at this aperture than it does on a slow lens. The 72mm thread is generous if you want to slot in an ND or grad for the bright end.