Canon nFD 135mm F2.0
Wide Open crispiness with just a little bit of character…
Canon nFD 135mm F2 @ F2 on my EOS R
Like many Canon FD lenses this lens has an unmistakable style to which it renders images. There’s a kind of duality with some of these high speed telephoto primes from the Canon FD line up. Lenses like this Canon nFD 135mm F2 exhibit good micro contrast and decent resolution at the point of focus but also suffer from defects like rather pronounced longitudinal chromatic aberration also known as Spherochromatism, which can render as some rather noticeable magenta fringing before the plane of focus and some green/slightly cyan fringing past the plane of focus. Backgrounds and foregrounds with considerable contrast showcase this phenomena more clearly, and it can further effect the smoothness of the bokeh if repetitive contrast patterns exist on the planes of focus transitions. The good news is this chromatic aberration is limited to quite close to the point of focus transitions.
Canon nFD 135mm F2 @ F2 on my EOS R
Canon nFD 135mm F2 @ F2 on my EOS R
The Canon nFD 135mm F2 is a curiously special lens, not only with the way it magically renders images, but also its chronology is a bit of a puzzling one, the lens was only ever released in the nFD series, coming onto the market in 1980. What’s curious about this is despite being entered into the Canon FD line up late into its life, it uses a remarkably simple but proven optical design, 6 elements in 5 groups. This optical design is of course a rather standard Planar type design in the sense it shares 6 elements in 5 groups layout of many classic Planar designs which is also shared with the much earlier Canon FD 135mm F2.5 S.C. lens, which was actually introduced very early in the FD line up in 1973. Although one look at the massive front element of the nFD 135mm F2 version when you compare the two will easily let you spot the difference in light gathering potential. The lens has a massive front element compared to many of the vintage lenses of the era which tapers down to a very thin metal edge of the lens to keep the overall diameter down to 78mm. Close focus is acceptable and exactly average for the era, it’s 4’3”/1.3m. This Planar design of a 135mm F2 was already popularized by Zeiss in the very early 1970’s with their Planar family of lenses which included a 135mm F2 with the same 6 elements in 5 groups, which was also the basis for the ARRI/Zeiss Standard Speed Cinema Prime which was a T2.1 lens.
The lens has an overall nice “technical” rendering and there is decent resolution toward the center of the frame. Combined with decent contrast across most of the entire image plane, likely aided by the more advanced coatings Canon had time to perfect by the their “late to the party” introduction of this lens into the 1980’s, this lens has higher than average contrast performance than many of its contemporary or older siblings when shot wide open at F2. Canon’s coatings seem to be leading the pack here.
Below are some examples, the first is an un-cropped & downsampled of the original 30MP (6720x4480) resolution to ~10MP (3840x2560), the second image is the approximately 200% cropped in a 16:9 aspect “region of interest” to see the level of detail rendered more closely.
Canon nFD 135mm F2 @ F2 on my EOS R
However, although resolution and contrast are good, in the example just above, there is some painfully obvious and mildly pronounced Spherochromatism/longitudinal chromatic aberration that can be found in many vintage high speed telephoto lenses without any exotic glass elements like aspheric ones. This lens uses a “purely spherical"" design.
Canon nFD 135mm F2 @ F2 on my EOS R
As can be noticed in the image above, wide open, the lens suffers from relatively minor vignetting compared to many of its contemporary's of the era; no doubt this is an appreciated benefit of a rather large diameter front element.
Canon nFD 135mm F2 @ F2 on my EOS R
The lens does make up for any technical aberrations with a super smooth and silky bokeh quality when wide open, melting away backgrounds while having some special magic to even make the colors rendered in the out of focus bokeh seem painterly.
