| Digital Lens on a Film Body
What happens when you place a digital lens onto a film body? Here is a photo.
Keep reading for a more detailed explanation and some clarification.
I believe the above image was cut off unintentionally, but I can’t seem to find my negatives to check. I seem to remember the actual negative being centered. Way to go Wal-mart photo lab.
The majority of digital camera lenses you will run across are not full frame. When I say they are not full frame I am talking about the area the light coming out of the back of the lens covers. This light only covers a portion of the 35mm film frame and you get a vignette effect as a result. You’ll also run into another issue since very few lenses designed for digital cameras have rings to control f-stop. That and many manufacturers changed their digital mounts to prevent you from switching lenses between cameras.
There are some ‘full frame’ digital cameras such as some of the newer Canon’s, but looking at specifications their ‘full frame’ is still shy of a 35mm frame. I would assume even using a full frame lens would still yield vignetting in most situations. That’s providing you could even mate the lens to your film body.
Film lenses on a digital body are another story entirely. I use a wide assortment of older k-mount and even M42 lenses on my K10D body. These lenses used on a digital body yield a sharper image than using it on 35mm (at least from my experiments). Since the frame is so much larger than your digital sensor you only use a smaller portion of the lens center. If you’ve done much research on lenses you’ll probably already know the center is the sharpest part of the lens. Discarding the sides (on my K10D) seems to produce a much sharper image.
Finally, I’ll mention an interesting side effect of using a 35mm lens on a digital. Depending on the crop factor of your body the lens length will change. My Pentax K10D has a crop factor of 1.5x, so any film lens I use is multiplied by that factor. The 50mm primes I love to use are actually 75mm (or 77mm according to the anti-shake system). This is great if you like to get closer, but not so great if you were planning on using a 35mm fisheye lens on your digital.
Posted by falcoln0014 
January 2010
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