I bought this 15yrs ago as a collector piece it came with the rifle and rubber lens hood for £50 , I was really happy when I found the helios 44 8 yrs later
The lens surprised me with how good it was - There was a certain amount of snobbery when I was at school, no one rated the Russian lenses, and now everyone sings their praises.
Hi ohjhajohh, I'd be really interested to see how you liked it if you got one - for me, whenever I had a long lens in the film days, they were always really cheap, second hand lenses of terrible quality, so this one compared very favourably. I'd like to see how it stood up against your Soligor 400mm, because you got some cracking footage with that one.
@@GrumpyTim I just picked one up today with the original case, pistol grip etc. So far the lens looks great. Only there is a small hair inside the lens. I will watch your disassembly video again and then decide whether I will clean it or not.
Wow, that's always nice if you get the case and so on too. Just see how you feel about the hair, if you don't fancy taking it apart you can always save that for another day.
Очень любезно, Диаригал, рад, что видео понравилось. Я посмотрел ваше видео Pentax 6x7, прекрасная презентация, которую приятно смотреть. That's very kind Diarigal, glad you liked the video. I watched your Pentax 6x7 video, lovely presentation and relaxing to watch.
I was in Ukraine last year and came home with two full kits. The trigger when the whole kit is used is a two stage trigger so you have to pull to stop it down and then pull through to snap a shot. It works well really.
Ahha, thanks Meatbyproducts, now that makes perfect sense, and probably really obvious if I'd stopped to think about it. I bet you were excited to get two full kits - they're quite an impressive set.
Haha, I'd never thought of dual weilding them, that's really cool. I'm sure you'll find a damaged one to hack for digital but maybe not as well priced as the ones you got in Ukraine - hopefully things will settle down and you'll be able to go back there one day.
Helios 44-2 was actually included in the Photosniper kit. I managed to score almost complete kit. It has all the filters and accessories except one screw driver. Paid a bit over 100€ for it, not bad for two lenses + accessories. Helios has a screw in mount below that black cap @2:35 and the cap also screws on. I bought 3/8 to 1/4 adapter for Tair but I had to file it shorter so it would fit nicely to tripod plate.
I just got one for me , mine is 3S black variant , and its like new , no damage on lenses and just few scratches on the metal , mostly like new . Probably due to case it is in and being hard to use heavy and clunky so its not been used much if at all . I didnt get it for usual photography but for Astrophotography where completely different parameters are valued . Built liek a tank is a must , and sharpness is not required , but flat field and nice geometry . I think it makes better images then some 200-300$ telescopes at F6
Well done, that sounds brilliant. I wouldn't be surprised if a fair few of these lenses haven't seen much use, they're not exactly an every day lens and I suspect some people would have bought them because they looked good without thinking what they were actually going to use them for. Hope you have lots of fun with your new lens - I really like mine.
@@GrumpyTim Im a different kind of user ,shooting stars and deep space , its gonna be used since im not gonna hold it , telescope mount is going to , i worked with minolta 100-300 before but Canon 55-250 is sharper , so i got that ,what i didnt realize is that its built quality is low real low , cant focus no focus throw when extended, almost impossible . The more you zoom in stars bloat up dont know why , and as you extend it it starts tilting front element due to plastic built . At that moment i realized i wasted my money and will never use Zoom again . So looked up primes , decided to try some vintage glass and stumbled on this . Today i checked it , shot the same object as with Canon 55-250 and Minolta 100-300 to compare , and it won hands down. I expected some Chroma , but there is not much , tolerable amount , fixable in post . Still didnt try Star fields but i trust its gonna be good . Stumbled across this one on AStro Forums , and since its a Prime stars are nice not bloated and build is more then good enough .
Hi GhostDu83, yeah, it's both a good lens optically and also it just looks so cool - I don't use it as often as I should but it looks great sitting on my shelf. Cheers for watching.
Hello, I would like to know if the optical quality of the 300mm tair is the same or similar to that of the Canon 300mm L series. Greetings from Colombia
Hi Pensador, I've always held the Canon L Series lenses in very high regard although I've never actually used any of them. My guess is that the Tair probably wouldn't be quite as good as the equivalent L series lens. The Tair is vastly better than some of the old, relatively unknown brand lenses that I used to use back in the 80s.
Canon L lenses have floriate elements in them , Fluorite is good because it has opposite chroma then normal glass , hence when you combine them , you remove chroma hence there is no way Tair can perform like that . But that being said , i use it on a Canon 5D full frame , the picture is just flawless , look at this , there is no optical problem in sight , cant see a flaw , other then dust spots on my sensor .And if you think this is Edited , its not , there is no edits on it other then Exposure and Contrast settings . This is at F8 , but its similar at F4.5 , not much different far as chroma goes drive.google.com/file/d/1Cj1bF9qfmrWrGWiH_8DgXqehcXthcEYS/view?usp=sharing. But you need to be Smart with your choice of Camera , take micro 4/3 like this guy from video , and you are out of luck. There is a REASON i take 2 KG heavy camera with me , i would like to take 100Grams of micro 4/3 with me ,why not , save my arms , but if i do that , i must buy lenses for it , and good ones are expensive . I paid 50$ for this Tair . There is no way on this earth you can take an image like that on micro 4/3 , or even DX sensor for 50$ , you need at least 200$ , and even then it wont be the same . For example Canon 600D with Canon55-200mm is a good Zoom lens and sensor . Its very good , but its F5.6 and 200mm with 50mm aperture and crop sensor . That counts , even tho its a better lens , has AF has Stabilization , has more resolution . But for what i use it for , Astrophotography and Art , its unusable , Chroma is high on stars , while Tair behaves it self . Focus is sloppy , lens is plastic , you cant hold focus , it tilts and shifts , and its just unusable . While tair is a TANK and has an oposite problem . Its hard to change the focus , so hard it pains me , because as you hold it , you need to move the hand further away , and its unwieldy to hold . But you know , wanna perfect lens 500mm F4 L glass , you need to pay that 100x more then this Tair . And you will get better pictures , but not 100x better , more like 3-4x better . So Budget in mind , i dont know of a better lens Camera combo , then 5D + Tair for general Zooming in .
Hi Val, I can't see any reason why you couldn't use one but it's not something that I've tried (I haven't got a polarising filter that big!!!). At the very worst, if you bought yourself a suitable sized filter and it didn't work well with the lens. you could use it on other lenses with the addition of step up/down rings. I tend to use one size of variable ND filter on most of my lenses with the aid of step up/down rings, which saves me buying lots of different ND filters.
years ago i bought a whole kit of the photosniper with the lens, seconds later of get from the mail man i attached to a canon 60D with a cheap ring from aliexpres, so sweeeeeeeet the moon photos, sharpen as f*** heavy of course as soviet machine and now the only thing i have from the set its the old filters attached to a 17-50 2.8 from tamron, i miss that soviet lens so far
Hi jbm - I didn't know what to expect when I got this lens, I just liked how it looked, but once I'd fixed it up and cleaned it, I love it, it's an amazing lens. I will at some point get a TAIR Nikon mount to replace the M42 mount that's fitted to the lens - you don't achieve infinity if you fit it to the Nikon with the M42 mount in place but the Nikon version of the mount is quite expensive so I'll stick to using it on my mirrorless cameras for now.
I will be recently getting a Praktica camera with the intent of getting one of these lenses in the future, but I am concerned about the whole cocking and trigger mechanism. So, all I'd have to do is cock it to change the aperture and take my meter reading, then press the aperture trigger, and then take the picture? No strange gymnastics or anything like that?
Hi Vanadse, it slightly depends on which model of Praktica you're using - I haven't used the built in exposure meter in an old film camera for quite a long time - I've tended to use a modern Sekonic exposure meter to get my exposure readings. If I remember correctly, on my Praktica MAT camera, there's a button that I press to take an exposure reading and it displays whether I'm over or under exposed in the viewfinder, however, that button also closes the aperture temporarily to take the meter reading using the little "auto" pin that many of the old M42 screw mount lenses had. As the TAIR 3 doesn't have that "auto" pin, you'd need to activate the aperture manually by pressing the lever, then press the button to take the meter reading, then re cock the aperture if you needed to adjust the aperture. Once you were happy with your exposure setting you would then activate the aperture again and shoot your photo or photos - you wouldn't necessarily have to re cock the aperture for each shot, so long as you were getting enough light through the lens to actually see your subject for framing. The process would have been much the same when shooting on one of the dedicated Zenit cameras, apart from the fact that the aperture would automatically close when you took the shot. I do remember using old "non auto" lenses when I only had film cameras and I did forget to close the aperture before taking the shot from time to time. It's a lot easier these days shooting on digital because if you forget to close the aperture you see immediately because the shot is overexposed so you can fix the error and re shoot. This lens is never going to be the fastest lens to set up a shot but in theory, if the light isn't changing all the time you should be able to set your aperture and film speed and then shoot away happily until the light level changes.
@@GrumpyTim That is more straightforward than I thought. And you are correct, It has the lever to take the meter readings, I dont think they ever got rid of that design since it started (which is brilliant actually). So it is a matter of cocking the Tair, choosing aperture, releasing the aperture, metering, and shooting. Thank you so very much for this little crash course, Tim. If everything goes to plan, I'll be playing around with it this December. Maybe a fast film so I can suppress the shaky hand-holding. As for shooting digital. It is still an idea I am mulling about. We'll see, if I come across a used one in good shape and the price is right.
Good point about using fast film - again I've been slightly spoiled by using digital where I can change ISO at will - the old rule of thumb using a shutter speed of twice the focal length to avoid shake would have you looking for a speed over 1/500th - in reality I usually get away with less but it's at least it's at least a starting point. With much of your shooting on the TAIR 3 you'll be able to shoot wide open because it's nice and sharp - I doubt you'll need to go further than f8 for most shots.
Cheers Mei Bing, as far as I'm aware, you can use a mount adapter to fit one of these lenses onto a Canon EF mount without a problem. The mount adapters are fairly cheap M42 to Canon EF ones. Obviously you don't get autofocus or any other electronic communication with the camera so it's manual all the way. You can use aperture priority so the camera will set the shutter speed once you've manually set the aperture on the lens but I tend to shoot fully manual anyway.
Hi One Eye, cheers, glad you liked the video. I just had a look at your channel - I like your lens reviews - it's great to see these old lenses being used again. Cheers for the comment.
man you got some serious videography skills..
HaHa, it's all very primitive stuff, but I did have a lot of fun filming parts of this video. Cheers for watching Ankur.
Superb video, thanks!!
Cheers FRBJ0016, I had fun making this one.
This intro maaaaaan! Beatiuful job!
Cheers Pavel, I had fun filming that bit.
Great video, thank you for this,l enjoyed it all.
Cheers spacedarkstar, as you can probably imagine I had quite a bit of fun filming some bits of this video! Cheers for watching.
I bought this 15yrs ago as a collector piece it came with the rifle and rubber lens hood for £50 , I was really happy when I found the helios 44 8 yrs later
That's really cool davejenx, I'd love to have the full kit - I've seen a few for sale, but they were a bit pricey for me - maybe one day.....
Results look pretty crisp!
The lens surprised me with how good it was - There was a certain amount of snobbery when I was at school, no one rated the Russian lenses, and now everyone sings their praises.
I'm watching this video again as I'm considering to buy this lens too
Hi ohjhajohh, I'd be really interested to see how you liked it if you got one - for me, whenever I had a long lens in the film days, they were always really cheap, second hand lenses of terrible quality, so this one compared very favourably. I'd like to see how it stood up against your Soligor 400mm, because you got some cracking footage with that one.
@@GrumpyTim I just picked one up today with the original case, pistol grip etc. So far the lens looks great. Only there is a small hair inside the lens. I will watch your disassembly video again and then decide whether I will clean it or not.
Wow, that's always nice if you get the case and so on too. Just see how you feel about the hair, if you don't fancy taking it apart you can always save that for another day.
Подача материала замечательная - лайк, подписка 👍
Очень любезно, Диаригал, рад, что видео понравилось. Я посмотрел ваше видео Pentax 6x7, прекрасная презентация, которую приятно смотреть.
That's very kind Diarigal, glad you liked the video. I watched your Pentax 6x7 video, lovely presentation and relaxing to watch.
@GrumpyTim Благодарю 🙏 Thanks
I was in Ukraine last year and came home with two full kits. The trigger when the whole kit is used is a two stage trigger so you have to pull to stop it down and then pull through to snap a shot. It works well really.
Ahha, thanks Meatbyproducts, now that makes perfect sense, and probably really obvious if I'd stopped to think about it. I bet you were excited to get two full kits - they're quite an impressive set.
@@GrumpyTim they are really cool. I took a photo of me dual wielding them.
I would love to find a damaged kit to convert to a digital camera set up.
Haha, I'd never thought of dual weilding them, that's really cool. I'm sure you'll find a damaged one to hack for digital but maybe not as well priced as the ones you got in Ukraine - hopefully things will settle down and you'll be able to go back there one day.
I spy with my little eye that in the intro the Tair lens is on the left of the Helios, and during the outro it's on the right of your Helios 44m-4.
Ah yes, these vintage lenses are very mischievous and like to swap positions between takes. Well spotted :-)
Helios 44-2 was actually included in the Photosniper kit. I managed to score almost complete kit. It has all the filters and accessories except one screw driver. Paid a bit over 100€ for it, not bad for two lenses + accessories. Helios has a screw in mount below that black cap @2:35 and the cap also screws on. I bought 3/8 to 1/4 adapter for Tair but I had to file it shorter so it would fit nicely to tripod plate.
I just got one for me , mine is 3S black variant , and its like new , no damage on lenses and just few scratches on the metal , mostly like new . Probably due to case it is in and being hard to use heavy and clunky so its not been used much if at all . I didnt get it for usual photography but for Astrophotography where completely different parameters are valued . Built liek a tank is a must , and sharpness is not required , but flat field and nice geometry . I think it makes better images then some 200-300$ telescopes at F6
Well done, that sounds brilliant. I wouldn't be surprised if a fair few of these lenses haven't seen much use, they're not exactly an every day lens and I suspect some people would have bought them because they looked good without thinking what they were actually going to use them for.
Hope you have lots of fun with your new lens - I really like mine.
@@GrumpyTim Im a different kind of user ,shooting stars and deep space , its gonna be used since im not gonna hold it , telescope mount is going to , i worked with minolta 100-300 before but Canon 55-250 is sharper , so i got that ,what i didnt realize is that its built quality is low real low , cant focus no focus throw when extended, almost impossible . The more you zoom in stars bloat up dont know why , and as you extend it it starts tilting front element due to plastic built .
At that moment i realized i wasted my money and will never use Zoom again .
So looked up primes , decided to try some vintage glass and stumbled on this .
Today i checked it , shot the same object as with Canon 55-250 and Minolta 100-300 to compare , and it won hands down.
I expected some Chroma , but there is not much , tolerable amount , fixable in post .
Still didnt try Star fields but i trust its gonna be good .
Stumbled across this one on AStro Forums , and since its a Prime stars are nice not bloated and build is more then good enough .
Wow, that's really interesting - I'd never really considered what lenses might be good for astro :-)
@@GrumpyTim i figured that much :)
This lens is awesome !
Hi GhostDu83, yeah, it's both a good lens optically and also it just looks so cool - I don't use it as often as I should but it looks great sitting on my shelf. Cheers for watching.
Hello, I would like to know if the optical quality of the 300mm tair is the same or similar to that of the Canon 300mm L series.
Greetings from Colombia
Hi Pensador, I've always held the Canon L Series lenses in very high regard although I've never actually used any of them. My guess is that the Tair probably wouldn't be quite as good as the equivalent L series lens. The Tair is vastly better than some of the old, relatively unknown brand lenses that I used to use back in the 80s.
Canon L lenses have floriate elements in them , Fluorite is good because it has opposite chroma then normal glass , hence when you combine them , you remove chroma hence there is no way Tair can perform like that .
But that being said , i use it on a Canon 5D full frame , the picture is just flawless , look at this , there is no optical problem in sight , cant see a flaw , other then dust spots on my sensor .And if you think this is Edited , its not , there is no edits on it other then Exposure and Contrast settings .
This is at F8 , but its similar at F4.5 , not much different far as chroma goes drive.google.com/file/d/1Cj1bF9qfmrWrGWiH_8DgXqehcXthcEYS/view?usp=sharing.
But you need to be Smart with your choice of Camera , take micro 4/3 like this guy from video , and you are out of luck.
There is a REASON i take 2 KG heavy camera with me , i would like to take 100Grams of micro 4/3 with me ,why not , save my arms , but if i do that , i must buy lenses for it , and good ones are expensive . I paid 50$ for this Tair .
There is no way on this earth you can take an image like that on micro 4/3 , or even DX sensor for 50$ , you need at least 200$ , and even then it wont be the same .
For example Canon 600D with Canon55-200mm is a good Zoom lens and sensor .
Its very good , but its F5.6 and 200mm with 50mm aperture and crop sensor .
That counts , even tho its a better lens , has AF has Stabilization , has more resolution .
But for what i use it for , Astrophotography and Art , its unusable , Chroma is high on stars , while Tair behaves it self . Focus is sloppy , lens is plastic , you cant hold focus , it tilts and shifts , and its just unusable .
While tair is a TANK and has an oposite problem . Its hard to change the focus , so hard it pains me , because as you hold it , you need to move the hand further away , and its unwieldy to hold .
But you know , wanna perfect lens 500mm F4 L glass , you need to pay that 100x more then this Tair .
And you will get better pictures , but not 100x better , more like 3-4x better .
So Budget in mind , i dont know of a better lens Camera combo , then 5D + Tair for general Zooming in .
Hi, and thanks for your video. I have Tair 3-s and can't find any info if it's possible to use modern CPL filter (72mm) on this lens?
Hi Val, I can't see any reason why you couldn't use one but it's not something that I've tried (I haven't got a polarising filter that big!!!). At the very worst, if you bought yourself a suitable sized filter and it didn't work well with the lens. you could use it on other lenses with the addition of step up/down rings. I tend to use one size of variable ND filter on most of my lenses with the aid of step up/down rings, which saves me buying lots of different ND filters.
years ago i bought a whole kit of the photosniper with the lens, seconds later of get from the mail man i attached to a canon 60D with a cheap ring from aliexpres, so sweeeeeeeet the moon photos, sharpen as f*** heavy of course as soviet machine and now the only thing i have from the set its the old filters attached to a 17-50 2.8 from tamron, i miss that soviet lens so far
Hi jbm - I didn't know what to expect when I got this lens, I just liked how it looked, but once I'd fixed it up and cleaned it, I love it, it's an amazing lens. I will at some point get a TAIR Nikon mount to replace the M42 mount that's fitted to the lens - you don't achieve infinity if you fit it to the Nikon with the M42 mount in place but the Nikon version of the mount is quite expensive so I'll stick to using it on my mirrorless cameras for now.
I will be recently getting a Praktica camera with the intent of getting one of these lenses in the future, but I am concerned about the whole cocking and trigger mechanism.
So, all I'd have to do is cock it to change the aperture and take my meter reading, then press the aperture trigger, and then take the picture? No strange gymnastics or anything like that?
Hi Vanadse, it slightly depends on which model of Praktica you're using - I haven't used the built in exposure meter in an old film camera for quite a long time - I've tended to use a modern Sekonic exposure meter to get my exposure readings.
If I remember correctly, on my Praktica MAT camera, there's a button that I press to take an exposure reading and it displays whether I'm over or under exposed in the viewfinder, however, that button also closes the aperture temporarily to take the meter reading using the little "auto" pin that many of the old M42 screw mount lenses had. As the TAIR 3 doesn't have that "auto" pin, you'd need to activate the aperture manually by pressing the lever, then press the button to take the meter reading, then re cock the aperture if you needed to adjust the aperture. Once you were happy with your exposure setting you would then activate the aperture again and shoot your photo or photos - you wouldn't necessarily have to re cock the aperture for each shot, so long as you were getting enough light through the lens to actually see your subject for framing.
The process would have been much the same when shooting on one of the dedicated Zenit cameras, apart from the fact that the aperture would automatically close when you took the shot.
I do remember using old "non auto" lenses when I only had film cameras and I did forget to close the aperture before taking the shot from time to time.
It's a lot easier these days shooting on digital because if you forget to close the aperture you see immediately because the shot is overexposed so you can fix the error and re shoot.
This lens is never going to be the fastest lens to set up a shot but in theory, if the light isn't changing all the time you should be able to set your aperture and film speed and then shoot away happily until the light level changes.
@@GrumpyTim That is more straightforward than I thought. And you are correct, It has the lever to take the meter readings, I dont think they ever got rid of that design since it started (which is brilliant actually).
So it is a matter of cocking the Tair, choosing aperture, releasing the aperture, metering, and shooting.
Thank you so very much for this little crash course, Tim. If everything goes to plan, I'll be playing around with it this December. Maybe a fast film so I can suppress the shaky hand-holding.
As for shooting digital. It is still an idea I am mulling about. We'll see, if I come across a used one in good shape and the price is right.
Good point about using fast film - again I've been slightly spoiled by using digital where I can change ISO at will - the old rule of thumb using a shutter speed of twice the focal length to avoid shake would have you looking for a speed over 1/500th - in reality I usually get away with less but it's at least it's at least a starting point. With much of your shooting on the TAIR 3 you'll be able to shoot wide open because it's nice and sharp - I doubt you'll need to go further than f8 for most shots.
Amazing restauration and video. You should sell these refurbished to collectors! Could it be used on a Canon EF Mount?
Cheers Mei Bing, as far as I'm aware, you can use a mount adapter to fit one of these lenses onto a Canon EF mount without a problem. The mount adapters are fairly cheap M42 to Canon EF ones. Obviously you don't get autofocus or any other electronic communication with the camera so it's manual all the way. You can use aperture priority so the camera will set the shutter speed once you've manually set the aperture on the lens but I tend to shoot fully manual anyway.
Great video! I am making a vintage lens channel in Korea. Your video is really helpful. Thank you.
Hi One Eye, cheers, glad you liked the video. I just had a look at your channel - I like your lens reviews - it's great to see these old lenses being used again. Cheers for the comment.
Nice video sir )
Cheers PC online - It was a bit of a giggle filming the intro to this one.
Hi Tim, if you're ever interested in selling the lens, let me know!
Cheers AMDK6, at the moment I'm quite enjoying using the TAIR 3 but if I do ever plan to sell it I'll let you know.