I'm not surprised that old lenses are great. Some of the best lenses I ever owned were old AND uncoated (Summar, Heliar, etc). What I am surprised at is that some of the Canon FD glass is so good! Before now, the only prime FD lenses I ever owned were a 50 1.8 and a 50 1.4. Now these are excellent performers, but truthfully a Leica R 50 stomps them in the dirt. Not so the longer FD and FL primes. I bought an FD 85 1.8 since starting this thread, and it's as good a portrait lens as I've ever used. OK, maybe an R Summicron 90 2.0 would be sharper, but that's of dubious benefit for portraits. I have nothing to base this on other than looking at web images, but I'm sure some of the old FD glass takes better photos than modern Canon glass. You just have to manually focus the lenses.
Trust me, not that many people are aware that the old Canon glass is really, really good. That, and the fact that up until recently you couldn't easily adapt the lenses to other cameras due to tight lens to film plane distances, has nicely kept prices affordable. Now, all the lenses aren't as good as others, but when you DO find glass this good, it's great.
I took these ages ago w/ that FD 50 1.8 I was talking about. Bought it and an AE-1 body w/ hippie strap in a Savannah thrift store for $13.50. And they took an ou tof state check for it. My best photo deal ever probably, image wise.
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