Pentax Super-Takumar 35mm f/2 (M42)

You are in the corner of a dim room and you want the whole room, not just a face. A 50mm backs you into the wall behind you. A 35mm f/2.8 drops your shutter to a sixtieth and your hands start to show in the frame. The Super-Takumar 35mm f/2 solves both at once. Wide enough to hold the environment, fast enough to keep the shutter where a steady grip can still use it. That is the shooting situation this lens owns, and slower wides lose.

It comes from the M42 screw-mount era, the Asahi Pentax Spotmatic years, when a wide-angle lens for an SLR had to clear a swinging mirror. So it is a retrofocus design, the front group throwing the optical center forward to buy back the space the mirror box stole. The first version is the big one, with a 67mm filter ring that dwarfs the rest of the Takumar line; Pentax later shrank the optics and the thread to 49mm. The "Super" marks the fully automatic diaphragm of the Spotmatic generation, the step up from the preset and semi-auto Takumars before it. The coating here is still the older single-layer type, a few years before Pentax's seven-layer SMC arrived in 1971.

Stopped to f/4 it is sharp across most of the frame, with the warm, slightly low-contrast rendering that made Takumars a cult. Wide open the center holds and the edges go soft, which is exactly what you want for a face in a busy room. Bokeh is smooth rather than showy, no harsh edges in the background, no nervous doubling. The honest weakness is flare. Point it into a window or a streetlight and the older coating throws veiling glare and contrast sags. A modern hood helps; the SMC successor helps more.

The crowd shooting it now is the adapter crowd. M42 lands on Sony E, Fuji X, and every other mirrorless body with a ten-dollar ring, which is why these lenses never died. On full frame the 35mm is the classic reportage and street length. On an APS-C body it frames like a normal, fine for portraits with some environment in them. Video shooters like the long, smooth focus throw and the way the character sits on faces.

The lens people cross-shop it against in M42 land is the Carl Zeiss Jena Flektogon 35mm f/2.4, which focuses far closer and resists flare better; the Takumar answers with warmer color and a better-built barrel. Prices have crept up, especially for the early 67mm version, but it is still a fraction of any native mirrorless 35mm. Because it opens to f/2 you can meter and shoot wide open in light that would send a slower 35mm to a tripod, and the Zone Light Meter app will hand you the shutter speed for f/2 in a dim interior so you can keep working the room.