> For a decent 20mm, you could pick up a Carl Zeiss Jena 20/2.8 in M42 > mount.
If I could FIND one. I know, they exist on e-bay, but I have yet to locate an example for sale from a dealer in the USA. I'm not savvy enough to use e-bay without getting burned. Fuji apparently made some great glass too, but despite having bought what appear to be the last three screw-mount Fujicas in the world, I have NEVER seen a Fuji EBC lens in M42 mount for sale. With patience and searching I have managed to locate pretty much all the Pentax K-mount and M42-mount lenses I wanted eventually. > Probably the best bet w/ wide glass on a Canon is to get something in > the Canon mount though. Even if it's a sigma/tokina/tamron/etc. I have > to wonder how some of the newer digital zooms (18-55, 16-45, etc.) > stack up when compared to the older wide glass. I'd be willing to bet > they'd be as good as some of those early wide-angles. Better, probably, especially if I got something recent. Computer-aided design, advanced aspherics, exotic glasses, etc have made miracles possible. The 15/3.5 was state-of-the-art in 1974, but now we have the Sigma 15-30 and various 12-24s which would have been impossible back then. The 20mm/2.8 EOS lens is apparently mediocre by modern standards but the 16-35/2.8 is supposedly quite good. The goal of the Canon 20D, though, was to be a digital host for my screw-mount lenses--I'd have bought a Pentax DSLR if they'd had one with 8MP, 5fps, a 20 frame buffer, and the ability to see B&W images in B&W in the camera. A nifty Canon ultrawide isn't going to fit on my Spotmatic SPIIs. Perhaps a new cheap zoom (18-55/16-45) or a third party ultrawide would be better than the SMC Takumar 20/4.5 which has troubles with distortion and sharpness towards the corners, but I'm not convinced. My experience with 3rd party lenses has been quite poor compared to Pentax/Nikon glass both in terms of optical performance and build quality. Both Pentax and Nikon have unfortunately recently learned how to make lenses almost as cheap and cheesy as the off-brand guys, and these haven't been impressive either--slow, distorted, loose and plasticy. And none of them are going to fit on a Spotmatic either. Most of the damn things don't even fit on a Nikon F4 or Pentax LX anymore due to the loss of physical aperture-coupling. DJE
