Manual Focus Lenses Forum

gaeger · Expire: 2026-01-06

When I buy a used camera online, I never know quite what to expect, especially when there's no description of the item! But these arrived a week ago in a condition of ... yuck.

The Nikkormat FT2 and Nikkor K 50mm f1.4 lens looked from the exterior as if they had been stored in a bog for the past 20 years.

The Nikkor K 35mm f2.8 was the exact opposite. It looked pristine on the exterior, but there was haze and dust on the internal elements.

A couple of hours of patient disassembly and cleaning, and things are looking much better. I removed the crumbling light seals from the FT2 and everything sounds good, but I'll have to wait to run some film until I can get to the store to buy replacement material for the seals.

But the 50mm and 35mm are good to go now! The dirt, grime and discoloration on the 50mm proved to be superficial, and the interior glass was clean! The internal haze and dust in the 35mm was easily removed, and now the glass matches the exterior.

So the black FT2 could now go with my chrome FT2, which is in user condition.

But wait ... then there popped up another set online: Chrome FT2 with 50mm f2, 28mm f3.5, 135mm f3.5, all K versions. I bought those too! And when they arrived ... they looked like they had never been used, except for marks on the mounts.

I didn't intend to wind up with three FT2s, but such is the peril of looking online.

55 · Expire: 2026-07-24

Doc Sharptail · Joined: 23 Nov 2020 Posts: 1475 Location: Winnipeg Canada

The FT-2 in chrome was my first camera, and I liked it a lot.
Looks like you've done well with the cameras shown here.
It's possible that some of those lenses are sleepers~ especially the K 1.4, and probably the 135 f3.5.
I haven't abandoned the niikormats completely. There's still an FTN here that I like that's in dent free condition, which is becoming a rarity these days. Find it at times hard to "roll back" from the F2, but any good condition nikkormat is worth a few rolls of film run through it. The earlier variant 1.4 I ran for a while on the FTN made a very capable combination- surprisingly good portrait outfit set up that way.

-D.S.

gaeger · Expire: 2026-01-06

I have the Nikkor-SC 50mm f1.4, too, and that's a nice lens. I took the 50mm f2 out on my D5500 the other day and it was pretty darn good. I'll probably sell one or other of the f1.4 lenses and keep the f2 just for variety. They are all in fantastic condition and deserve to get out.

On the Nikkormats: When I was in high school, I couldn't afford an SLR, and the youth pastor at our church had a Nikkormat, probably an FTN back then. Gosh, how I envied him that camera! In recent years, I bought an FT and FTN, then sold those and bought an FT3, then bought an FT2 and sold the FT3. I've decided that if I want to shoot AI-S lenses without ears, I use a Nikon EL-2, also a fine camera.

Now that I can have as many Nikkormats as I want, it's tempting to just keep buying them. (Well, perhaps my wife would object to that.)

And I just noticed that the lens on the silver FT2 in the second photo is the 35mm, not the 28mm!

stevemark · Joined: 29 Apr 2011 Posts: 5303 Location: Switzerland

That's a nice basic set of K lenses indeed - the classical 3.5/28 and the completely re-desiged 2.8/35mm as well as a fast 1.4/50mm and the classic 2/50mm plus the Sonnar type 3.5/135mm ... Wink

K type lenses are pretty scarce in Switzerland. I have just four K type primes: the 1.4/50, the 3.5/55 Micro, the 1.8/85mm and the 2.8/135mm. Both the 85mm as well as the 135mm seem factory-converted to Ai (which is nice of course).

S