carenar 1:2.8/35

$20, that's about the cost of a cheap filter. So sorry.

Yeah, so sorry. This is what is deeply repugnant about the gear acquisition school of amateur photography-- who the hell cares what James paid for his lens? Weston used a second-hand lens that cost $5-- I guess that means he wasn't a real photographer, and you wouldn't let him in your camera club. So sorry.

Re the OP-- you can Google 'Carenar' and find information here and there on the Web. This is probably a Korean or Japanese-made lens, rebadged as Carenar by a Swiss company. One guy on another forum speculates that they are rebadged Cosinas.

Harry, you need to seek enlightenment....there are some terrific inexpensive lenses available, especially in M42 mount. It seems there was a time when lenses were built rugged with decent optics and nothing to go wrong, while costing not too much money. Now.....all those electrical bits to go wrong, no way of manually setting aperture (even in manual mode on these modern lenses the apertures is still set electronically), all that modern electronic autofocus motor stuff... I've got lenses here that cost me a fiver and are favourites in my growing collection.

James, I don't know much about the Carenar...there's quite a lot of mention of it the internerd though. I had previously heard they were rebadged Cosinas as mentioned by Dave...but not 100% sure.

And of course, James, anything that enables you to get the Zenit out again is good value for money. Check out some of the other lenses available cheap as well - like the 1.8/50 Pentacon, and the 3.5/30 Meyer Optick Gorlitz Lydith.....the list goes on and on.

The lens is made in Japan if I were to believe the inscription on the front. I will test the lens and post the pictures. I plan on using two films Ilford PanF50 and Fuji 200 for color. I was hoping someone had an especially good/bad experience with them. I found some photos on the internet which seem to indicate a rather soft yet clear lens ... but maybe someone else thinks otherwise. I was simply trying to replace a Helios 44M-4 which I lost. Those seem to cost twice as much and seem to be a hassle to get a hold of in Cleveland.

Carena cameras were relatively inexpensive SLR's sold (at least) in Germany in the early 1970th; usually with all bells and wistles from large distributers like "Neckermann"; the same cameras were also available under the names "Revue" (Foto Quelle), "Porst" (another german distributer). The M42 lenses which came with them were marked "Carenar", and my 50/1.7 lens was a decent performer. At least some of the cameras were produced by Petri, but I wouldn't explude that also Cosina might have been involved in others.

Konrad, Thank you for your informative reply. Would you mind if I asked for a sample? Did you also happen to have a 35mm?

USE the lens to see if it's any good. Other peoples opinions and other people's lenses are meaningless. You are the only person with that particular lens.

For those who are still interested, I posted 2 pictures to illustrate the lens' capabilities.

http://photo.net/photodb/folder?folder_id=817863

There's some distortion. Either way fairly soon I should be able to post color to see if there's more problems in color.