Pentax SMC Takumar 135mm f/2.5

Pick this lens up cold and the first thing you notice is the weight. It is a dense slug of brass and glass, the kind of telephoto that screws onto a Spotmatic and makes the whole rig nose-heavy. People who shoot it tend to keep it for decades. It lives at the bottom of bags belonging to photographers who bought into the M42 system in the early seventies and never saw a reason to leave.

This is the fast brother to the much more common 135mm f/3.5 Takumar. That extra two-thirds of a stop matters less than the rendering it buys you. Wide open at f/2.5 the lens is soft in the corners and a touch low in contrast, with a glow around specular highlights that flatters skin and kills nothing in the shadows. Stop down to f/4 and it snaps into focus. By f/5.6 it is genuinely sharp across the center and stays that way through f/8, which is where most people who use it for portraits actually shoot. The bokeh is calm and round, no nervous edges, no onion rings. Backgrounds melt rather than smear.

The Super-Multi-Coated designation is the real reason to own a Takumar from this window. Pentax was ahead of almost everyone on multicoating in 1971, and you see it in how this lens handles a backlit scene. Shoot into a low sun and contrast holds where a single-coated rival would wash out gray. Flare, when it comes, is a contained veil rather than a screen of ghosts. That said, a deep rubber hood still earns its keep here.

The honest weakness is the focus throw and the close-focus limit. Minimum focus sits well over a meter, so this is not a lens for tight head shots or anything resembling detail work. It is built for half-length portraits, candid telephoto on the street, and pulling a subject off a busy background. Try to use it close and you will be backing up across the room.

Today it is a quiet bargain. The 135mm focal length is unfashionable, the f/2.5 versions are less hyped than the famous 50mm and 85mm Takumars, and an M42 adapter puts it on any mirrorless body for the price of a coffee. People cross-shop it against the Asahi 135mm f/3.5 and the various Soviet Jupiter-37 teles, and the Takumar wins on coating and on build feel. One metering habit pays off with the fast aperture: meter wide open in dim light to nail your reading, then stop down to your working aperture before the shot. Drop the f/2.5 into Zone Light Meter and the exposure it returns is the one you actually want.