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Kevin,
A big problem with most of the old lenses is that they dont handle the back reflections off a CCD chips surfaces, be it the glass, the filters, the silicon or the micro lenses.
The old silver and cellulose film absorbed most of the light that fell on it and did not suffer as much from back refelection, so the lenses simply didnt need to deal with the problem.
So the light gets scattered forward inside the lens and then back again onto the CCD causing loss of contrast at worst and bad reflections at worst.
For this reason there are only a few old lenses that happen to work well with CCDs.
I chose a camera system based on the "Value" I ascribed to the large collection of 1970/180's lenses I had collected over many years owning 35mm cameras, darkrooms etc
This was a mistake - not one of the zooms was any good on a CCD camera, ignoring the lack of automated focussing and aperture control - optically they were simply poor due to their lack of internal anntireflective coatings and probably also because they were never the finest optical quality in the first place !
They were all terribly slow and optically none of them were anywhere near as good as the cheap kit lenses supplied with the camera, and that brand still had another 2 tiers of lenses available abive Kit Lens - Kit, SemiPro and Pro.
Fortunately the camera system had some other great benefits for my particular interests that I hadnt considered before the purcase so my decision through sheer luck turned out to be a good one !
Its sad to have to reconcile old treasures like this to the scrap bin, I sentimentally still keep too many of mine in a box because I find it hard to part with them - they were bought on a low income and while at Uni, when I struggled to pay for for my hobby and they represent a lot of good old memories !
In some cases I look at the lens and remember the days experience when I shot some memorable (or often less than memorable) B+W photos and then spent time (often wasted) in the dark room processing them !
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