Why can’t I just use any lens on any camera?
ALet it be clear, Guru is no photography expert. A man from Boots keeps trying to put one of those passive-aggressive oval ‘it wasn’t our fault’ stickers on your author’s phone screen just to cut out the middle man. Guru is, though, a master of mashing things onto other things, so he can offer a few general clues here.
It may be tempting to suspect that manufacturer-specific lens types are just a way to tie you into an ecosystem and, over time, a way to ensure that the money firing out of your wallet towards your expensive DSLR habit lands directly in that manufacturer’s pocket. Not (entirely) so: a camera system is a delicate balance of sensor, connector, electronics and optics. For the body of your camera to work perfectly with its lens, the latter needs to be sitting at just the right flange focal length from the sensor in order to focus properly. Converting the threading and focal length of a foreign or vintage lens isn’t actually that tricky
– there’s a vast variety of converters out there that can help you attach one thing to another. They’re not cheap, however, because they generally need to use complicated bridging lenses to tweak the focal distance; turning those sparkling junk shop optics into something you can use could end up costing you bnitime.
If you can’t convert the electronic side of things, you may lose automatic control of a number of lens features – and if the lens you’re trying to use doesn’t have a manual aperture ring you’ll be stuck at maximum aperture, which isn’t ideal. Thankfully some converters use what are called dandelion chips to convert the communication protocols between lens and camera. These, again, add another layer of cost, because of course they do.