Lens Database

In 2014 we created the vintage lens database on the Legacy Lens website. The idea was to provide both technical info and some thoughts on what vintage lenses mean in terms of performance, reliability and costs. To keep things simple and clean, we focused only on lenses we actually owned and mainly on M42 lenses because they come in greater numbers than others. However, you'll also find some reviews on Minolta MD, Olympus OM and Pentax K lenses.

Our Lens Database currently has some 200 hundred lenses, made from the late 1950s until late the 1980s and ranging from 20mm and 500mm in terms of focal length. It includes all the important brands, such as Asahi-Pentax, Olympus, Minolta, Fujifilm, Carl Zeiss, Meyer-Optik, Pentacon, Helios, Tair and Mir, small manufacturers, such as Isco-Göttingen, Enna-München, Chinon, Makinon and third party manufacturers, such as Soligor, Revuenon, Vivitar and Coslinar.