About

We help people buy an old lens for a new camera without getting burned. Name the lens you’re after, like a Helios 44-2, a Super-Multi-Coated Takumar or a Nikkor 105mm f/2.5, and there’s a page for it. Each one tells you the lens’s story, its versions, the adapter it needs for your camera and what to check in a listing before you buy.

A forty-year-old lens hides its problems inside. Haze, fungus and oily blades rarely show in a quick product photo, and the same name can cover three versions with different coatings or mounts. So we keep 71 lens pages in one place, write down the tells that usually take a few bad buys to learn, and pick the listings we’d buy.

We don’t sell lenses. No affiliate links. We earn nothing. We run no analytics and set no tracking cookies. We’re not affiliated with any maker we cover or anyone who owns those names today. See how we work for how the pages are researched and our disclosure for how links, picks and photos work.

Old Glass is part of allbutnew, a set of shops for secondhand gear. Got lenses to sell? The “Get an offer” link on every lens page sends them to our lens expert, who replies by email.