Canon FL 1200 F11

cjphotojapan

I know this is strange title but I can not find much info about this lens. Can this lens be attached to a 7D in any way?:dunno How much is it worth? anything? I live in Japan and I found one of these things in a second hand shop. It is almost 3feet long and very very heavy.

ziggy53

This appears to be a "yes and no" sort of answer.

Yes, the Canon FL mount is physically the same as the FD mount, and you can get adapters to go from FD to EOS/EF mount (current).

No, the quality will suffer or you will lose infinity focus. The available converters have relatively cheap teleconverters to allow proper flange to imager focus and the optical properties will suffer. If you remove the optical teleconverter the lens would only be usable for close focus.

You could have the rear mount removed and have a new mount machined to allow proper infinity focus without an optical element. At 1200mm this requires very tight tolerances to maintain parallelism of the elements so it would probably be cost prohibitive.

Then again, you could just purchase an old Canon FD mount film camera, the AE1 Program is my favorite for features versus cost, and shoot the lens "old school", scanning after the film is developed.

run_kmc

If this is the same lens I've seen before, B&H has it for $40,000. That's not a mistake.

craig_d

Just out of curiosity, what's the price for the one in the Japanese second-hand shop? Does it actually work? Is the glass clean?

I agree with Ziggy; if I wanted to shoot an FL or FD lens on a Canon body, I'd get an AE-1 Program and scan the film. However, another alternative is to buy another digital camera with a shorter flange distance than the FL/FD mount and get an adapter for that. Last month I met a guy who was using a Canon FD 80-200mm f/2.8 zoom lens on an Olympus E-P2. He was getting great results with that combination (160-400mm equivalent focal length!). An FL 1200 on an E-P2 would give you results similar to a 2400mm lens.

ziggy53

craig_d wrote: »

... another alternative is to buy another digital camera with a shorter flange distance than the FL/FD mount and get an adapter for that. Last month I met a guy who was using a Canon FD 80-200mm f/2.8 zoom lens on an Olympus E-P2. He was getting great results with that combination (160-400mm equivalent focal length!). An FL 1200 on an E-P2 would give you results similar to a 2400mm lens.

That's a great idea. Without the mirror slap of a dSLR you could probably use the 1200mm/E-P2 combination on a single tripod too.

cjphotojapan

It was about $600. I am going back to the store Monday to look over the glass and ask a few question. Thank you for the information. It is just a crazy looking lens.