JAPB has had two major updates this spring.
Firstly, JAPB has (finally) matured enough to deserve its own domain.
Secondly, JAPB’s most popular part has received a major upgrade, and that is the topic of this update.
One of JAPB’s main attractions has long been that it offers a guide to identifying your lens mount. While that guide is not (and never can be) perfect, it does offer a usable heuristic as well as information to help identify more than 50 different interchangeable lens camera mounts. When I started the development of that guide (spring of 2020), my intent was to offer it as an all-in-one guide, but it quickly grew too big. The major upgrade that has been done to that article in spring 2022 are that:
Identification guides have been added for 11 mounts:
These new guides focus on a diverse range of mounts (from the Pentax 110 mount to the Pentacon Six mount) and they cover both relatively normal mounts (Such as the Fujica X and Mamiya Z mount) and outright unusual mounts (such as the Konica F and Olympus OM AF). For a full list of additions, see below:
• Contax / Kiev
• DKL mount
• Fujica X
• Konica F
• Mamiya Z
• Olympus OM Autofocus/Powerfocus
• Pentacon Six
• Pentax-110
• Petri FT
• Praktina
• Topcon UV
The guide to identifying your lens mount now focuses only on identifying lens mounts:
The previous (anno 2020) version also contained some trivia on the lens mounts it covered as well as discussing how to adapt the specific lens mounts to modern digital cameras, and this was part of the reason for why the guide became quite unmanageable (had you printed it, it would have spread over 100+ pages). As that information (trivia and discussions on adapting mounts) however is valuable, and I would rather have wanted to extend those bits, I launched…
A new article series on Lens Mounts:
Using both the existing bits on trivia and adapting, and – in most cases – creating entirely new text, JAPB has started a new article series (beside the existing series on optical flaws and aberrations and the series on lens defects) focusing on lens mounts. That series will – in all likelihood – never be finished, but this is one of those situations where I am a bit ‘zen’: To travel is its own reward. While I will continue on that series, it – in its current state – contains the following articles:
• Canon EF
• Canon FL, FD and newFD
• Contax G
• Contax / Kiev
• Contax/Yashica
• DKL
• Exakta
• Icarex BM
• Konica AR
• Konica F
• LTM (Leica Thread Mount)
• M42
• Mamiya Z
• Minolta SR
• Nikon F
• Olympus OM
• Pentacon Six
• Pentax K
• Petri FT
• Praktica B
• Praktina
• Topcon UV
Finally, a humble request: While I am a lens fanatic, even I cannot have sample lenses of every lens mount out there. More problematically, in many cases the only thing that precludes me from writing a new guide or article (or extending an existing guide) is that I do not have the pictures I need (because I don’t have the lenses on hand).
So if you want to contribute, you can do so by submitting pictures and being able to answer some questions I may have about how the lens actually operates. If you so wish, your name will be mentioned as co-author/photographer, but you must be willing to share the pictures under a Creative Commons license (see more here).