I converted this just tonight for EOS. It's a nice lens, well designed with a true floating-element design (unlike Canon's pseudo-floating-element design). The conversion from Canon FD to EOS was a bit of a bitch, mainly due to the aperture linkage thing and just the whole mount nonsense in general.
The upside is it came out well, is a nice lens that can be had for reasonable money ($75-150) and got great reviews back in the day.
Also nice is that it's super easy to get infinity on this. No mirror clearance issues whatsoever! On any camera, or nearly any mount too. Probably this is due to the fact this lens was made for several mounts (Oly, nikon, minolta, Canon FD, etc) so they must have designed the backfocus distance to be on the long side so it could be adapted to the various mounts as needed. The upside to that is there is PLENTY of distance between the rear elements and the mount face. Check the pics:
That's with the lens set at infinity! A nice relief after the constant element-ring shaving of the Rokkors.
I'd not opt to do a Canon FD conversion again, the only reason I did this one was I got the lens cheap w/o knowing what the mount was before I got it. I have another in Minolta mount that should be a lot easier to convert.
We'll see how it stacks up soon. Jim maybe you want to test drive it against that nice Minolta 28/2.0 you had shown a while back?
I am only a film shooter, so results will have to wait until I can do some shooting with it, have it processed and scanned. so, give me a few days. I just finished the conversion a few minutes ago... ;-)
Jim: thanks! I wish I had your skills/tools. would make life a lot easier. Someday I need to get a lathe or at least a drill press... :-P
I think some of the early vivitar series 1 stuff bears looking at. this 28 1.9 was the closest thing I was interested in , but the whole early series incl. the 3 cats are all supposed to be quite good, the best they ever did in fact.
The Vivitar Series 1 lenses from the seventies through mid-eighties are amongst the best made by any manufacturer at that time, and they still stand up very well. I've used some of the great ones on Pentax film (90/2.5 macro, 135/2.3, 200/3, 600/8 solid cat, 35-85/2.8, 70-210/2.8-4, 70-210/3.5), and I adapted many of them for Canon digital. I said adapted, as that's all you need to do for Pentax and M42 versions (as well as Nikon, Olympus and Contax), as opposed to Minolta, Konika and Canon FD, which all have registers shorter than Canon EOS, and so a simple mechanical adapter isn't sufficient.
Until about three or four years ago, the online resource Monaghan's Magasite was the best place to get information on Vivitar Series 1 and other "third party cult classics". The MM Third Party Lenses index page is still online at http://medfmt.8k.com/third/index.html, but none of the links have been live for some years now. I downloaded about a dozen of those linked pages some years ago, and I'd be happy to send them to you if you're interested.
