Fall shots with the FD 50/1.4 SSC

Hards80 · Joined: 14 Oct 2010 Posts: 16

thanks everyone for the continued nice comments. glad to have found this forum, great people and information here.

@dnas - great test examples, thanks for sharing for all that are interested.

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9096 Location: Houston, Texas

Very nice charts, dnas -- and very very interesting. I wonder how they would hold up against a Zeiss Planar or a Leitz Summicron. They clearly have the edge over the Nikon even. Which reminds me -- one of the reasons why I haven't had a burning urge to buy a 50/1.4 for my Canon FD outfit was because I have a Nikon F to Canon FD adapter, and I can always use my Nikkor 50/1.4 AIs on my Canon. But now, after seeing the charts, I'm thinking that I should go ahead and get one of them Canons. Some day.

Olivier -- I have an FD-EOS adapter and fast lenses' images are degraded rather severely when used at apertures wider than about f/4 or so. A LOT of flare with my adapter. Past about f/4, however, and I can't really see much image degradation at all. So, the FD-EOS adapter is still useful, but its usefulness is limited.

The adapter's optical element unscrews, though, so it's possible to use my FD lenses as macros, and they do a good job at this. But this is rather limiting and besides, I have three other macro lenses -- don't really need any more.

As for the differences between the SSC and the New FD version, well there are several. The New FD is physically smaller, and has the New FD-style lens mount, whereas the SSC has the older breechlock-style mount, with the large knurled chrome rear mounting ring. Filter sizes are 55mm (SSC) vs. 52mm (New FD). The New FD lenses have multicoating, whereas the SSC, which stands for "Super Spectra Coating," actually uses a single coating -- the SSC -- which Canon claimed to rival multicoating in its effectiveness. I've also read that the 50mm f/1.4 SSC also had an aspherical element, but I believe that whoever wrote that might have been confusing the 50mm f/1.4 SSC with the 55mm f/1.2 SSC Aspherical. Now, you want to talk about a sharp optic wide open -- give THAT one a try!

I have a couple of old Canon F-1 guides that show lens formulas for all the Canon lenses that were in production when the manuals were printed. They were both printed during the breechlock era, however, so I woudn't be able to determine if the lens formulas changed. But I suspect it did. I just looked up the 50/1.4 SSC in one of the books, and it mentions that the formula was based on the older FL 50/1.4's formula. So I guess they didn't see much reason to change it. Maybe the Mir site might have some info on the New FD 50's formula in that regard.

Yeah, well, maybe if I can find a 50/1.4 SSC in clean shape for $50 or so, I'll pick one up. But there weren't any available for that cheap on eBay last time I looked. Maybe my local camera shop might have something . . . It's been a good source for FD/FL stuff in the past. That's where I found my FD 85mm f/1.2 SS Asph and my FL 55mm f/1.2 -- for great prices, no less.

AhamB · Joined: 22 Jun 2008 Posts: 733 Location: Germany

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9096 Location: Houston, Texas

dnas · Joined: 14 Nov 2008 Posts: 488 Location: Japan

I do't know which is correct about SC & SSC and single/multi coatings, but I have both SC and SSC, and the SSC reflections are different in colour to SC.

AhamB · Joined: 22 Jun 2008 Posts: 733 Location: Germany

@Cooltouch: Interesting info. I can believe that perhaps even SSC was originally a single coating, but I think that at later stages Canon must have changed it into multi-layer coatings, maybe even before the new FD era (seems likely to me anyway).
I think the main reason why the SSC designation was dropped for the new FD line was that practically the whole line of lenses shared the same (multi)coatings, not that there was a sudden switch from single layer SSC to all multi-coating. Again, that wiki says:

cooltouch · Joined: 15 Jan 2009 Posts: 9096 Location: Houston, Texas

Okay this is going back some 20 years ago again, so my specific recollections might be a bit hazy. But as I recall from the research I did back then, Canon switched to a multi-layer coating with the New FD lenses since, by that time, just about everybody else was using them and there was no perceived prestige value to SSC anymore.

You may very well be right about SSC evolving from single to multi-layer. I've often wondered why, back during the New FD era, Canon's TS lenses, which were still breechlock, were also labeled "SSC". It didn't seem practical to me to have a different method of coating for just those lenses. And, as you indicate, the fact that Canon is still using this SSC designation, indicates to me it's more of a branding thing than any sort of reference to historical accuracy. It stretches credibility beyond belief that Canon would be using the same coating technology now as they did back in the 70s.

I did a bit of googling on this subject, and must confess that I didn't come up with anything other than a Wikipedia listing that has clear errors. It states unequivocally that both SC and SSC coatings were multi-coatings, and is probably the source of the current view that these coatings are and always have been multi-coatings. Which obviously isn't the case, since I have Canon literature which contradicts this.