The lens can be seen in this image attached to the FotoDiox 0.72x Focal Reducer using it's Canon FD mount and then adding it to the Olympus OM-D E-M5.
Page Last Edited : Wednesday, 18th of June 2025.
© Dave Rowlands. All Rights Reserved.
The lens itself was released in 1976, so give it a couple of more years of use and it will be 50 years old in 2026, WOW! It's an Adaptall lens which doesn't seem to fit very well on an Adaptall 2 mount. I managed to pick up the Tamron Canon FD mount for it it and it felt more stable in my hands. The lens itself is the "CT-200" which is not the Adaptall 2 mount but the version before it, below are a couple of shots of the Adaptall and Adaptall 2 FD mount adapters added onto Tamron lenses.
The visible difference is the little gear at the top which spins as the aperture is changed.
The main difference is now that the little gear at the top has gone and a couple of subtle lever differences in the stop down system.
The two images below were taken using the FotoDiox combination mentioned above but processed differently in "IrvanView", I know it's classed as a "Graphic Viewer" and a lot of folks (experts) on the internet seem to dislike how it handles images but if setup properly, just like everything else, to the way you want it can be a fine piece of software for quickly creating image files for uploading or sending via email, anyway who decides what an acceptable image is anyway?
The original image was was taken at 1/1000 second at f3.5 with ISO set to 200 on the E-M5 with the FotoDiox Focal Reducer which meant the lens was a 144mm with a max aperture of f2.52 .
I Used the "Smart Curve" under "Adobe 8BF Plugins" in the "Image" menu, pressing shift and clicking on the "Auto" button and then just left click the "Auto" button again and it creates this, you can sharpen the result if you want or change the parameters to achieve an effect you are happy with.
This result was created just by holding down "Shift" and pressing "U" or selecting "Auto-Adjust Colors" in the "Image menu. This can mess up sometimes and other times create some great images.
The image below was processed in "OM Workspace" using one of my presets, which takes a while to load up on my aging Windows 11 laptop but it allows you to mess about with your ORF files to your heart's content.
Below is a cropped screenshot of the OM Workshop screen showing a 100% view of the RAW image on the left and the image with my preset applied on the right. As you can see the RAW data from the camera is nothing spectacular, a bit bland and awfully flat. It just goes to show that massive amounts of processing is required to get a pleasing JPeg image from RAW sensor data.
Right, enough of that, so after removing the lens from the E-M5 and detaching the Focal Reducer I placed it onto my E-M5 II. After having surgery last September 2023 for a collapsed lung I was finding it harder to focus just using the magnification assist on the E-M5 and ended up with a lot of poorly focused shots with my manual lenses. I ended up using my E-M5 II more of the time but after getting the E-M1 II which has the ability to have up to ten of your older lenses added to the camera where it is mentioned in the Exif Data I am now spoilt for choice. It's such a shame it took so long for camera manufacturers to allow users to input their own lens data so it can be viewed in the final images EXIF data.
A few shots below with the Tamron 200mm f3.5 on my E-M5 II.
It certainly looks the part on my good looking E-M5 II with grips, now I have got used to siver I wouldn't give it up for any other shiny kit, it rocks.
The lens balances well in the hands, it's almost as if it is made for this camera. The addition of the included lens hood is always appreciated.
It's great having focus peaking, it was one of those aids that should have been included in the original E-M5. I think it would have been an even bigger hit if they had included it even in a Firmware upgrade.
To think I only paid £10.00 for this Tamron 200mm f3.5 which after a clean shows itself off very well on all my cameras and to think all you need to do to get some great results is to step back in time for a few seconds.
Older lenses are great, especially if you get one in good condition. As long as the glass is free from haze and fungus and the aperture and focus work as they should you are halfway there in creating some stunning photographs. These older lenses have a personality of their own, they were designed to work with film, some of these lenses would never be compatible with the high resolution capabilities of today's modern sensors. So, why do I buy these older lenses?
Well, most of the lenses I now currently buy are ones I wanted to own all those years ago but couldn't afford them or even give myself a good enough reason as to why I should own one especially when earning £12.50 a week and what you lusted after because of the advertising cost ten times that, you kind of held back. I did try using them on some older equipment a lot of years ago but the film and printing process were absolutely awful and too expensive so I gave it up for a decade or more. It was scanning my older negatives and Kodachrome slides that got me looking into the digital aspect of photography and this is how I ended up where I am now.
The lenses I tend to keep now, which isn't that many anymore, all have to pass my selfish "Looks Good" criteria, and I don't just mean the lenses themselves. The resulting images must also have character, but then with modern technology you can "fake" anything you like, it's a shame really as the original result actually evokes memories of a past long forgotten, I sometimes go through some of my scanned images and wonder why the masses were convinced that to be able to enlarge the photograph so you can see an eyelash is more important than the resulting image. I have a number of images, digital ones along with saved film processed ones hanging on walls somewhere but I then wonder who will appreciate the memory except me or those included in the final image?
I haven't had much of a chance to take this lens out for a trial, I like using the longer lenses for photographing landscapes, other folks I have spoken to don't seem to understand that landscape photography doesn't mean wide angle lenses. I remember years ago taking a few shots while panning left to right and then combining the images to create a panoramic view and being asked which wide angle lense I used for that particular shot, this way of taking photographs has been made much easier with digital cameras and the software used, I still use the "Image Composite Editor" by Microsoft to merge my images even though it has been archived for a few years now, there are others but I find this a no fuss, quick way of getting a resulting image from a few poorly captured images. It can even create panoramas from your movies as well.
The shot below was taken indoors at the end of November at around 5:30 PM in very poor light, two LED table lamps rated at 20 Watts each, using my OM-D E-M10 at 1/30th second at f3.5 with ISO auto set to 5000 and about two and a half meters away, which by the way is just about its minimum focusing distance. I focused on the gold lettering and as can be seen the DOF is very shallow. The three axis IBIS of the E-M10 did become noticeable, or lacking, during the summer using some of my other lenses, especially the 500mm f8 mirror, and it's what made me decide to sell it on and put the money towards the OM-D E-M1 II which I finally managed to get just before my 73rd birthday, I still prefer version two of most photographic goodies I buy as they always seem to have a personality that was missing in the first release.
All in all the lens is quite a good performer, a little soft maybe a its maximum aperture but once stopped down a stop or two it does me well. As usual the crop factor of 2x applies on the M43 camera bodies and hand holding a 400mm lens at 1/30th of a second was practically an impossibility in my film days, my TriX pushed to 1200 ASA would have needed a tripod and the result wouldn't have been as sharp and would have required an exposure of at least 1/8th of a second shutter speed.
I now never stop any of my older lenses down more than a few stops and never past f8 because of diffraction, and with today's highly populated image sensors it is hard to ignore. The amount of diffraction of course varies from camera to camera, and it is also influenced by resolution and sensor size so you may have a great, really expensive lens that won't outperform that generic over the counter one used by the masses, and all because of the expensive all singing sensor in the camera you are using. There is always focus stacking though if your camera is capable of doing it automatically and you really need that depth of field a smaller aperture can give you.
Below is another shot taken using the lens, it was taken by my Great Grandson who absolutely loves using my "OM-D E-M1 II" and doesn't seem to like the silver version of the camera used to take this shot, the OM-D E-M5 II. It took him a few goes as he didn't quite connect the non auto focusing but enjoyed the control he had over what he chose to be in focus and that it changed colour as he focused.
Taken by my nine year old Great Grandson in April 2024 using an Olympus "OM-D E-M5 II" at 1/250th of a second, f3.5 with an ISO set automatically to 200 through a double glazed window a few hours after a heavy rainstorm.
A 100% crop so the three cables cutting across the image could be seen in more detail.
What got to him was the three power cables cutting across the frame and he wanted to know if the resulting image would show them as he could just about see them with his naked eyes. I then showed him how to see a 100 percent crop of what he took and the result is just below it where he was so amazed he commented that he could count the twists in the wire.
Included below are a couple of shots taken roughly at the same time, on July 30th 2024, both are at the full aperture of f3.5 with and without the Canon Extender (TC) on my OM-D E-M5.
This shot was taken without the Canon 2x-B Teleconverter on the lens. On the E-M5 it would have the field of view of a 400mm telephoto. Shutter at 1/1250th second, f3.5 ISO 250.
As usual the weather was not the best.
This shot was taken with the Canon 2x-B Teleconverter, Canon calls the TC an "Extender", on the lens. The TC is according to Canon only meant for lenses up to 300mm in focal length but I have used it on my 500mm f8 with some great results. Shutter at 1/1000th second, f3.5 ISO 250.
As usual the weather was not the best but the sun seemed to have come out on the hillside opposite.
Using the TC on the lens means the focal length was increased to 400mm but also the maximum aperture also decreased to f7. Adding this combination to the E-M5 meant that the field of view, in terms of a full frame 35mm image, would now behave like an 800mm f7 lens which is was pretty hard to focus on the E-M5 as it does not have "Focus Peaking", it's a shame as I think it would have made the Olympus OM-D E-M5 even more popular. I eventually stopped using the E-M5 with my older lenses and when it developed the Date\Time problems it never got used much at all.
The E-M5 II is much easier to use with older lenses and when I finally got the E-M1 II it was the end of the road for any camera that didn't have focus peaking in its armoury. I still say to this day that if Olympus had put Focus Peaking into the E-M5 it would have been the camera of the century.
