Review by Klaus Schroiff, published September 2010

Introduction

Such adapted lenses can only be used with manual focusing and "working aperture" - there's no data coupling whatsoever here. The field-of-view is equivalent to about 75mm in and in terms of depth-of-field it behaves like a f/5 lens in this scope - a portrait lens if you can live with the rather slow max. aperture. The Heliar looks expensive but at around 600-700EUR/US$ it isn't totally out of reach (if you can still find one).

You may debate whether the Heliar is a beauty of a lens but it is certainly far from the ordinary. The build quality is very fine albeit not perfect. The body is, obviously, made of metal - nickel that is. The lockable focus ring is located at the rear portion of the lens - it operates smoothly (damped). The aperture ring sits at the lens front. While also being made of metal it is a fairly wobbly being. As usual it locks in distinctive f-stop "clicks". Any change of the aperture is applied immediately so you can check the effect on the depth-of-field on your screen (without the darkening like when stopping down a DSLR with a conventional optical viewfinder). The lens extends a tiny bit when focusing towards closer focus distances. The front element does not rotate. The Heliar is a collapsible lens (not shown here) so if ever needed you can make it even smaller. It's a bit of an awkward procedure so most will probably leave it in its working position.

Manual focusing may sound like a major annoyance but it is not that bad actually. On Sony NEX cameras you can easily switch to a magnified focus view so accurate manual focusing is really simple ... unless you try to track a moving object of course. We recommend this camera-lens combination for static scenes only.