A Soviet copy of the Carl Zeiss Biotar 58mm f2, the Helios is known for its unique ‘swirly’ bokeh, as well as its relative sharpness. My only worry is that some people might think that this lens is representative of all classical lenses. I have found, contrary to Josh, that it’s a challenging lens to use as a general shooter as it looses a lot of contrast very easily, even closed down, when a light source is near the frame. I think one thing to note is that the swirl of the bokeh on the 44-2 is also slightly more pronounced (I feel) than the 44-M (having shot both on film fairly extensively I feel fairly comfortable making that assertion). The caveat here is that I didn’t shoot the lenses alongside each other (I told you this was unscientific) these shoots took place on different days, on different film, under different lighting with a different model - so you know, there are lots of differences but this feels like more of a real world comparison so let’s see how they shape up… the one thing that was the same was these were both shot on the Silver Spotmatic F.

You can always go by the serial number, with the first two numbers delineating the year that the lens was made… except that some plants only specified the decade, and some models didn’t put the year in the serial number at all.Something that is fairly interesting is that each lens has the logo of the plant where it was made visible on the front, so you can work out who (probably) made your lens by referring to this handy page (or this one if you’d rather avoid Google Translate).

Little side note – its flare resistance is low even with sidelight, with serious contrast loss on all frame so use blend or just compensate with PS. It’s worth stating at this point that any assessment of Eastern bloc/Soviet equipment (or any vintage kit for that matter) should be seen as being applicable to ‘this specific lens’ rather than ‘this applies to every copy ever made of this lens’ time and tide have no doubt been unkind to some of this gear over the years and frankly some of the build quality out of the former Soviet Union wasn’t brilliant to start with so YMMV (quite a bit) In fact that’s one of the reasons for writing this blog - there are some many flipping (often contradictory) views on which lens is best etc etc that there really is no susbtitute for finding these things out for yourself! com/wiki/Helios-44 Long story short, the number represents the generation and sharpness, thus the sharpest of them all is the Helios 44M-7.The problem with infinity focusing might be due to Zenit’s M39 mount having a flange distance of 45. When I shoot a tight portrait – it is quite a challenge, a slight movement can get a person’s eye out of focus. I had one ages ago with an adapter on my original DSLR, a Pentax K-x, with an adapter but without realising at the time it would only focus very closely (due to the adapter and distance from lens to sensor being greater than lens to film plane on an M39 rangefinder). Helios 44-2 is not dust resistant, so be really careful, the sand can easily get into the mechanism.