Minolta lens on a canon camera

[jimothy]

My FIL has a canon DSLR, and a nice long zoom from his old minolta film SLR. He'd like to use the minolta zoom on his canon if possible, save having to sell it and buy a new canon one (not so easy in Zambia).
Has anyone tried the adapter rings for such things? Any thoughts/recommendations etc?

Thanks

[SamHH]

I have no experience of doing this but my understanding is if the lens's native mount has a flange-to-film distance greater than the flange-to-film distance of the recipient mount, you simply need a metal adapter ring. If the flange-to-film distance is less, you have to use an adapter that has an optical element in order to be able to focus to infinity. The downside of these is that they cost a bit more and add another piece of glass which probably worsens the image quality.

According to Wikipedia the Canon EF mount (used on all their DSLRs) has a distance of 44.0mm; the Minolta AF, 44.5mm (i.e. needing just a metal ring); the Minolta SR, 43.5mm (i.e. needing a optical adapter).

In any case, he'll lose autofocus (if the lens had it in the first place) and aperture control unless the lens has an aperture ring. Also, all of the above is just theoretical; I don't know if anyone actually makes adapters. Unless it's really impossible or expensive to get a Canon lens in Zambia, I'd suggest this would be the better option.

[mas99]

I use adapter rings all the time. Its a great way of getting cheap high quality primes if you dont mind manual focus. I have minolta/yashica/olympusOM/pentax/M42 adapters.

As Sam says, you'll have to do manual setting of the aperture and manual focus. I'm an olympus user so I can't be sure how things work in canon land, but I can use either manual or aperture mode reliably with the camera exposure metering working fine.

ebay is your friend for adapters, lots of vendors. You would need to know exactly what mount it is though. try someone just put minolta lens eos into the search and see what you find, most of them come from china/HK

If it is an AF (autofocus) lens then I would say think about selling it. The Minolta AF stuff works on the Sony DSLRs. (Sony bought Konica Minolta for their camera stuff and it forms the basis of the Sony range). So you can get money from a sony user and put it towards a dedicated lens for the canon. Of course if they are really good lenses maybe he should sell the canon body nd get a sony alpha?

Sigma/tokina/tamron all make canon fit lenses cheaper than canon branded ones - albeit you need to watch the quality of some of them - lots of people seem to find that sigmas need to go straight back to be calibrated.

Edited by mas99 on Saturday 13th June 12:14