When JAPB started in 2020, one of the first things we published was a guide to help people identify the lens mount that their lens had. In the subsequent years, we’ve kept updating that guide with new lens mounts. All the while, the Identifying a lens mount -guide has remained in the top-5 most visited pages on JAPB.
JAPBs ability to keep adding lens mounts has been partially thanks to some judicious purchases on our behalf as well as some rather blatant photographing of lens mounts at flea markets and similar occasion. But what has very much gladdened us is that lately, increasingly readers have gotten in touch and donated pictures and helped understand what those pictures are showing. As there are still several dozens of lens mounts that JAPB does not cover, we hope you will continue to donate.
In the meantime, it has also become increasingly obvious to us that the original structure of the Identifying a lens mount -guide was no longer suitable. That structure had been created when the guide included maybe two dozen lens mounts (and significant variants), whereas the guide now (after the latest update) contains close to 90 mounts and variants.
A restructuring and streamlining was clearly called for, and we had gathered a significant backlog of donations that we did not want to start process before having figured out how to restructure the guide.
What have we done?
First, we have retained the fundamental logic of the guide: a separation into thread mounts, obvious breech-lock mounts1 and bayonet mounts (including less obvious breech lock mounts).
Thread mounts are addressed based on the thread diameter and thread pitch. Obvious breech-lock mounts are not especially numerous and easy to distinguish.
Bayonet mounts are the clearly most numerous category and here we have retained and clarified the previous logic: Starting by identifying the locking mechanism used by the mount (locking pin; locking notch or locking groove) and grouping lens mounts base on the location of these locking mechanisms.
But as the guide (even after increasingly focusing only on the identifying of lens mounts) began to be over 100 A4 pages (!) long it was also clear that something had to be done to improve readability.
After several experiments, we decided to utilise the power of accordions (as a user interface element). The main idea behind an accordion is that it initially shows only a headline (or a short snippet of the intended content), but that as soon as you click it, the accordion opens up showing the entire content (see image below).
We hope that you will be happy with the update and we welcome all kinds of feedback as well as any lens mount related information you might have. Please visit the restructured guide here.
Footnotes
- We refer to a breech-lock mount as an obvious breech-lock, if the locking/fastening ring is part of the lens. ↩︎