Adapted Lenses on MFT bodies

There is a variety of old legacy lenses and modern electronic lenses from other brands that are not designed for Micro Four Thirds (MFT) bodies. Tinkerers just love using these lenses on modern bodies. It's important you identify the other brand mount so that you can hunt up an adapter to fit that lens on your MFT body.

35mm Legacy Lens Mounts (all mechanical, no autofocus motor in the lens)

  • Olympus OM mount (film SLR)

    • Olympus PEN-F mount (half frame film SLR)

    • M42 screw thread (used by Pentax, Praktica, Olympus, Seagull SLRs and heaps others)

    • Minolta MC/MD mount

    • Canon FD mount

    • Pentax K mount (used by Pentax, Ricoh, Seagull)

    • Konica Hexar

    • Yashica ML / Contax SLR (made by Kyocera)

    • Nikon all mechanical

    • Mamiya mount

    • Fuji mount

    • Leica LTM

    • Leica M39

An unusual mount that is quite popular because it is for CCTV lenses is the C mount. These C mount lenses (there are variations) do not create an image circle of coverage for "full frame" bodies but are quite useable on MFT bodies.

There are also medium format legacy lens mounts

Combination Lens mounts (mechanical + electronic or fully electronic)

    • Minolta / Sony A mount

    • Sony E mount

    • Nikon electronic (based on the previous Nikon mechanical mount)

    • Canon EF / EFS mount for their EOS cameras

Note that later lenses lost their mechanical f/no aperture ring

When you search the online stores or ebay, use the mount keywords e.g. "OM MFT adapter"

Types of Adapters

There are two types of adapters

  • Adapters with no glass inside and are hollow brass pipes.

  • Adapters with glass inside that typically implement 0.7x focal length reduction and 1 stop brightening of the exposure. These are called Focal Reducers or Lens Turbo

More info