Canon FD lens mount

First look at the Canon FD 200mm 2.8 to be used on my Sony a7

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• published: 07 Jul 2015
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I look at a Canon FD 200mm 2.8 lens and make sure the Aperture Control is working after purchasing this lens on EBay. The lens is around 40 years old but will have bring an affordable fast zoom to my Sony camera. I plan to adapt the lens to my Sony a7ii camera using a Fotodiox adapter. Fotodiox E to FD adapter - http://amzn.to/1RhkCAV Sony a7ii - http://goo.gl/rznAwR Canon FD 200mm 2.8 - http://goo.gl/J3svdB I wanted to give a quick look on the new lens I just picked up. It’s a Canon FD 200mm 2.8 manual focus lens. We will be using manual focus for my purposes. The FD was introduced in the FD line in the1970’s so this lens is about 40 years old. This is really an FDN or FD new or the new FD and physically this should be silver I believe right in here. That’s the only physical difference. I think some have stated there is a little more plastic on these to make them lighter, although I have not seen any evidence to that so I don’t quite believe it. And some people have claimed there is a multi-coating on the lenses on the FDN, which we will call this FDN, as opposed to a single coating on the optics for the original FD. So I guess going forward in the video I will refer to this as just a FD200 2.8 as most people do. And I wanted to show you how to test the aperture feature real quick so you can make sure you get a lens that works. This will make your aperture work. You will see it in a minute. You can see how small it is. It’s set to 5.6 so it shouldn’t be that small. I moved it to 2.8 just then. Again, you can see moving the aperture ring is doing nothing. Now it’s on F32. So what we’ve got to do is I’m going to get as much space here. Move the focus knob. You’ve got your red dot and up to the upper right of that dot you’ve got a little pin and this pin you just need to push down gently and just put a little pressure clockwise and keep that locked down. And then here there is another pin on this side and we gently push it down and we are going to try to…you gotta hold this one down. There we go. Once you get that middle barrel section rolling, you’re good to go. Now you can see instantly that it has opened up. So it goes wide open once that is locked. So it thinks it’s on the camera and everything on cameras are metered wide open. Even today. Modern DSLRs and mirrorless cameras. So, right there. So you do that test. Well, why is that so small? Well, it’s probably because I have it set on F32. So big F number, actually small opening. It’s because it’s a focal ratio. That’s wide open at 2.8. For some perspective, let’s go to F5.6. There ya go. So you can see and we can take it down to F11. See, it gets smaller, and by the time you get to F32 that baby is a pinhole. There you have it and that’s how you tell that your Canon FD aperture control is working, so if you find one of these at a yard sale and want to know if it works, that’s how you tell. Now how do you get back to the state where it doesn’t think it’s mounted on the camera? This silver button right here, we are going to push it in and simply go back the other way. Again, once you get it started, you’re good to go. We are simply going to rotate until it clicks and we are good and you can see it has gone right back to there. So, I don’t know what exactly that F is, but it does look like F11 although we are set on F32. Well, maybe that is F32. I don’t really know and I don’t guess it matters. We can replace the lens cap, rear lens cap, front lens cap. I will be testing this lens on my Sony a7 Mark ii in the coming days. Once I receive my FotoDiox Sony FD adapter. I absolutely can’t wait to get that in. I will have a link to the adapter below just in case and you can hunt down FD lenses on eBay. They are relatively inexpensive compared to their modern day counterparts, so if you wanted a 51.2 you could expect to pay somewhere between $500-$600 for a mint condition FD lens. You will need to make sure there is no haze, fungus, scratches on the optics, dust, stuff like that. On this one I just bought it sight unseen from a seller that had a 100% positive feedback. I paid $179 for this lens on ebay and I consider this a steal for a 200 2.8 FD lens. I look forward to doing the next video to where I actually adapt it to my Sony and do a review of the lens with some sample shots.