Why a good pre-owned lens will nowadays cost you more than ever

Pre-owned, second-hand, up-cycled, used…call it want you want, either way the price of older lenses has risen dramatically in recent times.

There used to be a very interesting website at bokehmarket.com (don’t bother, it’s long dead) which tracked the prices of used photography gear. It was very comprehensive, scraping data from places like eBay in order to create charts of how much things had sold for at various times. It’s a shame it’s gone, because it would have been a great way to substantiate a fact that will hopefully not be controversial enough to raise any serious question: the prices of old photo lenses have not so much jumped the shark as lined up a whole row of toothy underwater creatures and flown overhead on a jet pack in a stunt worthy of Evel Knievel himself.

The value of obsolescent gear has always described a sort of bathtub curve, and stills glass of the metal-built, manual-focus, early-eighties variety spent much of the early 2000s languishing in the bottom of that curve for so long we’d have been forgiven for assuming the situation was permanent. It used to be possible to buy a Meyer Optik 50mm f/1.8 Oreston for a couple of dozen units of currency, back when everyone was aware that they weren’t particularly sharp or contrasty but hadn’t noticed that even cheap old lenses tended to be better-built than even the best modern stuff. Now they’re often four times as much, and that’s not even the worst news.

Decent optics, indecent prices

Stills lens ranges frequently lack anything between 50 and 100mm, which has always pushed up prices of lenses around 85mm. At the time of writing there was an SMC Pentax A 85mm f/1.4 in K mount on eBay for a shade over £1000. Okay, that’s partly due to recent UK political-economic shenanigans, but it’s possible to buy a brand new Meike full-frame PL-mount prime with focus gearing, a 45mm image circle and a warranty for around the same amount of money. There’s even a used CP2 up for only £1600, which is likely to outperform Pentax as a cinema lens in quite a few ways all at once.

There are cheaper options, even from the same company (or at least its predecessor) in that we can get an exquisite 85mm f/1.8 M42 SMC Takumar for perhaps £400 delivered from Japan, but even those used to go for £150. People get excited about those lenses, and less cautious commentators have even compared them to a certain very famous British cinema lens manufacturer, though that seems to be much more to do with the fact that a lot of them have golden-tinted coatings and there’s a certain temptation to associate that with golden flares. In reality exactly the opposite may be true, in that dichroic coatings will reflect yellow while transmitting blue, but it’s been a while since the science of optical physics was permitted to participate in any debate over lens behaviour.

The other source of pain is the wide end. Lens ranges designed for classic 35mm stills photography – thus a full-frame imaging area – tend not to bother with much below 28mm, which feels pretty wide on an 8-perf 35mm still. Even the 28mm options tend to be slow, and faster, wider choices are rare and extremely expensive. The SMC Takumar 20mm somehow manages to sell for nearly £200 despite being a not-tremendously-useful f/4.5, and even the 28 is f/3.5. People looking for options in Nikon mount often end up buying the Tokina RMC 17mm which is a reasonably clean and neutral choice, and built like a tank, but still exceeds £200 for an f/3.5 lens. If there’s a reason to hold out for modern cameras with a mandatory four-digit minimum ISO, this is it.

The poster child for wayward prices

The poster child for the utter absurdity of old lens pricing, though, is the Canon FD series, or at least certain members of that range. This has occurred, almost certainly, because of a connection between FD lenses and Canon’s contemporaneous, early-eighties K35 PL-mount lens series. The K35s, for that matter, have managed to distinguish themselves even in the world of high-end cinema glass by going from nice-car to nice-house amounts of money, possibly because they were used on Aliens, as if the appearance of that movie had more to do with the fairly middle-of-the-road look of the K35s than it did to Cameron’s background in production design.

It’s true that some FD mount lenses (particularly, but not universally or exclusively, the varieties including aspheric elements and a particular type of coating) donated their optical design to K35s. Whether that justifies the £1000-plus price tag of the FD 55mm f/1.2 aspherical lens is a vexed question in a world where 50mm lenses are perpetually the least expensive option. What’s less controversial is that the almost eight thousand pound asking price for an FD 85mm f/1.2 SSC Aspherical with free fungus (and you may read the italics in an incredulous screech) is probably not very sensible. If you want a clean one, add another thousand, plus tax and import duty, and that’s for a lens built for an inconveniently shallow mount that will only adapt to things like Sony E, micro four-thirds and Fuji X. Probably the least-unreasonable use for this lens would be to have it rebuilt into a PL or, better, LPL chassis, resulting in that rarest of blooms: a used still photo lens that would somehow allow the Zeiss Supreme Prime 85mm f/1.5 (a snip at £15k, plus tax) to compete on price. And you still wouldn’t have electronic lens data.

Normally, it’s best when this sort of discussion of lenses leaves room for artistic merit, and for the idea that someone might really, really like the results and find them worth paying for. That’s a very fast 85mm lens, even faster than the Supreme Prime, but you can buy a very fast camera for that much money. This isn’t just lens pricing gone mad. It’s lens pricing gone mad, committed to an asylum, escaped, gone on a gleeful spree of Texas Chainsawing, and finally cornered wearing its victim’s skin and singing the goblin song. 

If you have that much money to spend on glass, great, though this sort of thing has broader fallout. Superstitions about the relationship between the price of gear and quality of results are pernicious enough at the best of times. When recently-graduated film students are casting about for a set of cheap stills primes with which to stagger through that awkward first eighteen months, it’s not really very fair if the first nifty fifty that pops up costs more than a car for no readily apparent reason.