Pentax SMC Takumar 50mm f/1.4

Put this next to a Canon FD 50mm f/1.4 and the fight comes down to color and coatings. The Canon is a touch contrastier and cooler. The Takumar, especially the late seven-element version with Pentax's Super Multi Coating, throws warmer, gentler color and shrugs off flare in situations where the FD throws a veil. For years M42 shooters argued the SMC Takumar was among the best-coated normals of the early 1970s, and they were mostly right. This is a double-Gauss, the same basic layout as every fast normal of the era, but Pentax's coating work is what people actually remember.

Wide open at f/1.4 it is soft and glowy, with the kind of low-contrast bloom around highlights that portrait shooters either love or fight in post. Stop down to f/2.8 and it snaps into real sharpness; by f/5.6 it is as crisp as anything from the period and holds well into the corners. Bokeh is smooth and rounded with six aperture blades, no harsh edges in defocused points, though busy backgrounds at middle apertures can get slightly nervous. Field curvature is mild. The rendering signature is that warmth plus a soft falloff from the plane of focus, which is why it has become a favorite to adapt onto mirrorless and digital bodies with a cheap M42 ring.

There is a real quirk worth knowing. Many of these radioactive-glass examples (Pentax used thorium in some rear elements for the f/1.4) have yellowed over fifty years to a visible amber tint. It is harmless to you, but it shifts your color balance and costs you up to a stop on badly yellowed copies. You can bleach most of it out with days to weeks of UV or sunlight exposure. On black and white it does not matter. On color film, factor it in or correct it.

Who shoots it: anyone who wants character out of a fast fifty without paying for it. Street and environmental portrait work mostly, on Spotmatics and Pentax screwmount bodies. It is not a clinical landscape lens and nobody pretends otherwise. The honest weakness is wide-open performance. If you need bitingly sharp results at f/1.4 you will be happier with a modern lens or even the Takumar 55mm f/1.8, which is sharper wide open and dirt cheap.

Today it sits in the affordable-classic tier, cross-shopped against the Helios 44-2, the FD 50, and the Minolta MC Rokkor 58mm. People still buy it for the SMC color and the build, which is all metal and lovely to focus. One metering note: this is a manual M42 lens with no electronic link, so meter it wide open in dim rooms to confirm your reading, then set your working aperture by hand. If your copy has gone amber from thorium yellowing, Zone Light Meter's exposure compensation lets you dial back the up-to-a-stop loss so your negatives land where you metered them.