Canon New FD 28mm f/2

Canon already sold a cheaper, smaller 28mm f/2.8, and most people bought that one. The New FD 28mm f/2 is the version you reached for when ISO 400 pushed a stop still left you under 1/30 at a night market, no flash, and you wanted a wide field instead of the tighter look of a 50. That extra stop is the whole argument for this lens, and it is a good one if you shoot in the dark.

It is a retrofocus design, as every fast SLR wide has to be, pushing the rear group forward so the optics clear the swinging mirror. That construction costs you a little at the edges wide open. Open to f/2 and the corners go soft, vignetting darkens the frame edges, and there is mild field curvature that pulls the very corners off the plane of focus. None of that hurts the work this lens actually does, which is people and streets in low light where the center carries the picture. Stop down to f/5.6 and it tightens up properly, with the even, neutral contrast the New FD coatings gave the whole line.

The rendering is neutral and clean rather than showy. Out-of-focus areas at 28mm are never the point, but backgrounds stay calm and the falloff into them is gentle. Flare control is good for its day; shoot into a streetlight and you get a contained ghost or two, not a washed frame, though a hood helps. Color is neutral and matches the rest of an FD kit, which mattered when you carried three primes and wanted them to look like one set.

Who uses it now: FD shooters who already live in the system, plus documentary and street people who want a fast 28 on a film body without paying Leica money. It cross-shops against the Nikkor 28mm f/2 Ai-S, which has a stronger cult following and a higher price. The Canon is the value pick of that pair, and the New FD version is lighter and cheaper than the earlier breech-lock FD 28mm f/2 S.S.C. that preceded it. The honest weakness, beyond the soft wide-open corners, stays the same across the line: nothing fixes geometry at f/2 except stopping down.

One thing the old reviews got backwards is adapting. FD lenses go onto mirrorless cleanly with a plain dumb adapter and reach infinity, because mounts like Sony E, Canon RF, and Micro Four Thirds sit far closer to the sensor than the FD flange. The corrective-glass problem only shows up when you try to put FD glass on a Canon EF DSLR, where the flange distance is nearly identical and there is no room for a spacer. So this 28 has a second life on digital bodies, not just film.

It takes 52mm filters, the standard size across most of the FD primes, so one set of grads or a polarizer covers the kit. Working it wide open in a dark room, meter for the shadow you care about: drop your taking aperture and film speed into Zone Light Meter, read the shadow you want to hold as Zone III, and let the highlights fall where they land.