The Auto Chinon 200 mm f/3.5 telephoto lens is an M42 mount lens made originally for use on the Chinon CS and CX range of film cameras. An example can be picked up for almost no money on well known on-line auction sites and are easily adapted to use with a modern mirrorless camera like the Fuji X-T1.
Auto Chinon 200 mm f/3.5 Sample Pictures
Auto Chinon 200 mm f/3.5 Description
The lens, like most of its vintage, is a heavy unit being made of metal and glass with no plastic components. This makes it slightly awkward to balance on a modern light weight camera - you need to support the weight in your hand and can't just hold the camera body. That said, it's not difficult to use as long as you are happy to focus manually and the X-T1's excellent focus assist modes help there.
There is a 6 blade aperture fitted with a ring allowing adjustment from f/3.5 to f/22 with half stop clicks at all points except f/3.5 to f/4 and f/16 to f/22. The aperture is controlled by a pin in the base of the lens and an auto manual switch, but with a mirrorless camera this switch is disabled as the pin is permanently pushed in by the adapter.
On the front of the lens is a collapsible lens hood, which is always a useful addition to a lens because although the lens elements are coated, a lens hood is still the most effective way of limiting flare and ghosting.
Using the Auto Chinon 200 mm
I used the lens on my X-T1 with the ISO set to auto and the shutter speed and aperture set by me for what I needed for each particular shot. Because the lens is fairly long I made sure the shutter speed was at least 1/250 and had the aperture between f/3.5 and f/8 for these shots on this not particularly sunny day.
Overall I found this to be a reasonably performing lens, especially if you take into account the price you can pick one up for. As with all lenses the performance improves as the lens is stopped down, but with the lens opened up there is some nice swirly background which is starting to show in the flower picture above and would be more apparent if the background was further away.
The pictures above were all shot in RAW, imported into Lightroom and given slight tweaking for exposure and contrast. The pictures of the pigeon in the tree also had some manual correction for CA since there was a bit of purple fringing around some of the branches.
