You sit down with your cinematographer to prep for an upcoming shoot and they pitch you the idea of using vintage glass: “Wait until you see the character, the bokeh, the highlight falloff!” Sounds good to you, right? So, you pull out your laptop, click over to your favorite camera equipment rental site, pull up the catalog of vintage lenses, and, upon glimpsing the average cost of a Canon FD rental, immediately fall out of your chair. OK, maybe the Canon K-35s are cheaper. Nope, actually they're even pricier. Same goes for Contax Zeiss, Zeiss Super Speeds, B & L Super Baltars, and virtually every other set of vintage glass. Then, out of curiosity, you click over to B&H Photo and see that modern lenses with vintage characteristics can be purchased for the price of a one-day K-35 rental. What’s the deal?
Why Go Vintage?
Recently, enthusiasm for vintage cine lenses has reached a fever pitch, thanks in large part to the advancements in camera sensors. Never before have consumers been able to purchase professional cameras with large, clean, cinema-ready sensors for under two thousand dollars. Add in overseas lens companies producing high-quality glass for around the same price, and the democratization of video suddenly comes into focus.
This is a great thing for the art form in general, lowering the barrier to entry and bringing in a more diverse set of voices, but it also means our screens and algorithms are flooded with “cinematic”-style advertisements, social media posts, music videos, and other forms of content. How can filmmakers possibly stand out when everyone and their mother can spend a couple hundred bucks to rent a camera that shoots IMAX-quality images? The answer is labyrinthian: lighting, framing, set design, acting, writing, editing—the list goes on.
But for this piece, let’s focus on one piece of the puzzle: lenses. A film shot with a set of Rokinon cine lenses can look totally solid, but compare it to something shot on the aforementioned Canon K-35's, and the difference in price starts to make sense. Visual aesthetics will always be highly subjective and difficult to capture in words, but there’s something about vintage glass that plays on the nostalgia receptors in our brain. It looks like the films we grew up watching, or at the very least, closer to what we see in theaters. The way these lenses capture skin tones, textures, flares, and out of focus areas of the frame achieve something unquantifiable.
Typical viewers probably aren’t aware of “flaws” like focus breathing, chromatic aberration, or cat’s-eye bokeh, but they can intrinsically feel the character of the image, and the lens is often a major factor in that character. So, assuming true Petzval’s and Baltars are out of your budget, is it possible to get comparable images with modern cine lenses that tout vintage characteristics? Yes and no.
It’s important to state upfront that these contemporary cine lenses come in a vast array of flavors. All have unique advantages and disadvantages versus older glass and tend to be less expensive than their old-school equivalents. That means you’ll have more money to spend on other equally important aspects such as lights, set dressing, actors, etc.
While cost saving is the biggest advantage of going with modern lenses, there are other pluses. Lenses produced in the last ten years often have higher quality control, with a more consistent look, size, weight, and focus rotation across their line-ups. That can save a ton of time when swapping lenses on set, plus put less strain on your post-production team during the edit. Older lenses often exhibit minor color cast differences that can take a lot of work to match up in post, as well as variations in build quality and condition resulting from decades of use. Sure, there are companies that rehouse vintage glass to give them uniformity and reliability, but that rehousing comes at an even higher mark-up. So, let’s break down some modern “faux-vintage” lenses and see what options are out there at every budget level.
Modern Vintage Lenses
On the cost-saving end, you can get SLR Magic MicroPrime Cine's for less than $500 a piece. These lenses are fast, compact, and can cover full frame sensors. Pick up a wide like the 18mm and a telephoto like the 75mm and you're ready to shoot an entire film. Their 13-blade irises produce a nice pronounced bokeh, and many users praise their accurate colors and contrast. Shoot them all the way open to get a slightly swirly look or close down the aperture for a more naturalistic feel.
If you're shooting with a Super35 sensor, consider the Mitakon Zhongyi Speedmasters. Coming in at a blazing fast T1, you can pick up a three-lens kit for around $1K. These have the same soft, warm look as the MicroPrime, with a little better clarity and contrast near the center, as well as a slightly stronger build quality. As with any lens in this price bracket, there may be minor inconsistencies in image across a set, but either line is more than capable of capturing a retro feel without breaking the bank.
Going up a bit in price, we have the incredibly popular Meike Full Frame Prime Cine Lenses, with a 3-lens kit coming in at around three thousand dollars. These lenses aren't quite as fast at T2.1 to T2.5, but they make up for it with stronger build quality and increased sharpness and contrast across the image. Again, use them wide open for a soft, dreamy look, or stop them down for a sharper, more clinical feel. With a warm color cast and pronounced flaring, they can still hit that retro sweet spot, but their superior sharpness means they could also slot in on a corporate shoot.
Dulen's APO Mini Prime series come in at around the same price, with similar T2.4 apertures, but differentiate themselves with a special coating meant to smooth out skin tones, increase halation, and produce an idiosyncratic "rainbow" flare. That means they might not have as much versatility as Meike's, but if you're going all in on style, these are the superior option. The footage people have captured with them is beautiful, with fantastic colors and highlight fall-off. Plus, the APOs are tiny, weighing barely more than a pound and measuring less than three inches.
On the higher priced end of the market, DZOFilm's VESPID Cine Lenses have taken the filmmaking world by storm. Each lens will run you around $1.5K, but they're rugged, fast, and produce natural images with fantastic bokeh, accurate skin tones, great highlight roll off, and just enough personality to stand out from the pack. These have found a home on tons of indie sets, and I find they produce a more filmic look than most modern lenses at any price point.
Going another step up from the VESPIDs, the Cooke SP3 Full-Frame Primes produce gorgeous images in an incredibly small form factor. At $4.5K a lens, they're certainly not the most budget friendly, but that's still a fraction of the cost of other lenses in Cooke line-up, especially the Speed Panchro's that directly inspired these SP3's. Cooke is a legendary lens maker, and the SP3s are their first offering designed for smaller mirrorless and cinema cameras.
For run-and-gun filmmakers or smaller production companies looking to create grounded and subtly stylized content, the SP3s could be the perfect solution. With the VESPID's and the SP3s, we're again dealing with sets that can be used wide open for a creamy, dreamy look, or stopped down for a sharper image. When you're dropping this amount of money on lenses, versatility is key, as well as the ability to slot them in on high-end sets alongside lenses that cost six figures. Both VESPID's and SP3's easily check those boxes.
Real World Results
The worst possible outcome of using vintage or “faux-vintage” lenses is an overly stylized look that distracts the viewer and draws attention away from your story. I’ve found this happens most often when filmmakers employ cheap, fast lenses with their aperture all the way open, creating a smudgy, mushy look with so much bokeh that the image has no sense of place or leading lines for the eye. I’ve also been disappointed with a lot of the results from anamorphic adapters and de-tuning attachments for modern lenses. These both attempt to add vintage characteristics, but often produce overexaggerated distortion and a wonky final image. I chose to spotlight faux-vintage lenses because I sincerely believe the sets mentioned above do a good job at integrating retro aesthetics without going overboard.
Sure, there’s going to be a notable visual difference between a film shot on SLR Magic MicroPrime’s and a film shot with a set of Contax Zeiss, but the more affordable picks are a great way for younger creators to move away from over-sharpened photo lenses with miniscule focus throws. By investing in cine glass, they can fine tune their focus pulling and train their eyes to notice subtle variations in lens characteristics, two massively important skills as they move up in their career. True vintage glass will still be the go-to for larger productions, but these budget-friendly options shouldn’t be written off. When combined with thoughtful framing, lighting, and post work, they can produce beautiful images that also hit the nostalgia receptors.
All these lenses went through tons of research and development to land on their final builds, and we can even see different sets from the same manufacturers amplify vintage characteristics to their breaking point. An example of this is DZOFilm’s VESPID Retro kit that came out after the primary VESPID line. The lenses in this kit capture cooler blue tones in the shadows and warmer amber flares than regular VESPIDs, with a golden glow around highlights that becomes more exaggerated at certain angles.
Having used regular VESPIDs for a few projects, I was excited to get my hands on the Retro kit and try them out in the real world. Online sample footage leaned heavily into their old school aesthetic, with nostalgic subject matter, slower pacing, and a dreamy feel. Curious how they’d hold up in a standard documentary shoot, I took a few to Times Square in New York City during the solar eclipse and captured some cinéma-verité-style test footage. Some shots were virtually indistinguishable from what a standard VESPID would capture, while others really showcased the warmer tones and amber flares. You can see some screenshots from this footage above and below.
I liked the look for the most part, and could easily imagine assignments where it fits, but I also think a lot of it could be achieved with standard VESPIDs and some careful color work in DaVinci Resolve. Having the “retro” feel locked into your image straight out of camera has its benefits, namely less tinkering in post and a more unified aesthetic, but with intricate modern coloring tools, I think it’s better to err on the side of caution with unmodifiable visual choices.
Smooth highlight roll off, accurate skin tones, and pleasing bokeh are elements I want to lock in. A strong amber glow? Not so much. For me, the regular VESPIDs are a textbook example of great contemporary lenses with a throwback feel, while the VESPID Retros are a bit too unique to fit into my workflow. I can also easily imagine renting Cooke SP3’s in the future for higher budget one-man-band shoots, while most true vintage lenses are simply too heavy, costly, and breakable for my style of documentary production.
I hope this piece has helped you realize that vintage lenses aren’t the be-all end-all for achieving a unique look, and there are tons of solid modern options for filmmakers at every price point. Whether you’re going with true vintage glass or new glass with vintage characteristics, remember to think about what emotion you’re trying to illicit in your viewer and how the visual aesthetics of the shot can help achieve it. A lens is simply a paintbrush, and we’re lucky to live in a time with more great paintbrushes than ever before.
What’s your go-to lens for getting a nostalgic vibe? Let us know in the comments section below!
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