Auto Cintar 50/2, M42 (Spring 2012)
Sometimes it's relaxing and rewarding to spend a little time with an old friend - the kind that doesn't put on airs, the kind that's easy and undemanding to be around, that kind that you're instantly comfortable with. That's what's going on here: a brief "photo session" with a nice old 50mm f2 in M42 mount.
In fact, the lens in question seems to be a close cousin of the lens with which I took about 99% of my pictures, for my first five or ten years in the hobby. That was an Auto Mamiya/Sekor 50/2, long since stolen, along with the Praktica Super TL body to which it was attached. (Both have been replaced.) This lens was marketed under the venerable Argus brand name, even wearing the "Cintar" designation, dating back to the days of the good old Argus C3. It was originally sold, I believe, as the standard lens for the Argus CR-1 SLR, although there also seems to have been a 55/1.7 Cintar option. At this point in the brand's life, "Argus" was just a licensed mark, applied to a number of intermediate-quality M42 SLRs that may have been made by Chinon, or Cosina, or Mamiya...it gets a little difficult to keep track of the players here, with or without a scorecard. The 50/2 Cintar shares several styling cues with the contemporary similar-specification lenses from those manufacturers. Its main claim to uniqueness seems to be a focus ring decorated with large circular dimples - an unusual detail for its time, although it anticipates, to an extent, the look of some current kit zooms. Oh, and it lacks an auto-manual switch, necessitating the use of a flanged adapter on a DSLR.
Like my old Mamiya lens, the Cintar is easy and predictable to handle, and reasonably sharp wide-open, with very attractive out-of-focus rendering - about what one would expect from such an established, thoroughly-debugged Planar design. But I certainly don't mean to damn it with faint praise. On the contrary: it can be rather startling to be reminded of the sort of performance one can achieve with what might reasonably be termed a commodity-grade lens of its era. If I have a criticism, it's that minimum focus is just a few inches too long; the difference between 0.5 meters and 0.45 meters may seem inconsequential, but I found myself having to back off a bit for several of these shots in order to get the subject in focus.
But that's a minor quibble. This was a thoroughly pleasant, slightly nostalgic experience, only made more enjoyable by the thought that I was shooting an Argus lens - although an Argus in name only - on a modern digital body.
