The Working Man’s Leica – Pentax Super Takumar Lenses
Leica is a name that carries a lot of weight within the film community. Leica lenses in particular are highly praised. Both for their compact, high-quality design & construction, but also for their phenomenal optical quality. However, all Leica lenses share one common flaw, their high cost. Even someone interested the least desirable examples will quickly find themselves running up a bill of several thousand dollars for a single lens.
Yet, despite this the desire for optically excellent, well-built, and compact manual lenses remains.
A solid alternative to Leica that I’ve found are the Super-Takumar lenses from Pentax, made between 1964 and 1972. These lenses are extremely well made, constructed entirely of metal with ridiculously smooth focus operation and clickey aperture rings. The design of the Pentax Super-Takumar primes even resembles Leica. Plus, most of the standard focal lengths are quite compact too.
Optically they don’t leave anything on the table either. The Super-Takumar lenses are coated with Pentax’s excellent optical coatings; which perhaps don’t quite rival the coatings Leica uses on their current lenses, but still perform amicably. Sharpness, contrast, and very importantly, character are all present with each Super-Takumar lens. They all render images with a distinct & beautiful character that does’t overpower the image while still having an air of specialness about them; something for which Leica is often praised.
Availability & pricing
The original Super-Takumars made in the 1960’s and 1970’s featured an m42 screw mount. Which means that they can very easily be adapted to just about any SLR system with inexpensive adapter rings. There’s also a very wide selection of focal lengths available, ranging from a very wide 15mm all the way up to 1000mm super telephotos.
But the best part of all, aside from some of the very rare and collectable models, most of the Pentax Super-Takumar lenses sell for only a few hundred dollars each; some of the really popular standard focal lengths like 50mm, 55mm, and 35mm, can sometimes be found for less than $100.00.
The Pentax Super-Takumars offer in my opinion a very similar experience to Leica lenses, not only in terms of design, construction, and handling, but also in terms of image quality. Considering how most of these lenses are very reasonably priced, it’s safe to say that they represent a fantastic value to any analogue photographer on a budget who does’t want to sacrifice optical quality or a high-end handling experience.
This post originally appeared in The Chaotic Lensman newsletter.
Never miss a story – Subscribe now to The Chaotic Lensman and have old-fashioned, bite-sized analogue photography content delivered right to you inbox.
