the 7 coolest lenses ever made

Every lens in this video does something wrong. One of them swirls, one of them glows, one of them almost got a cinematographer fired off The Godfather, and one of them only 10 were ever built and Stanley Kubrick bought three of them. So, we're covering seven lenses that are broken in exactly the right way

and we're starting with the one that you could still buy for 50 bucks, the Helios 44-2. You could buy one for 50 bucks because the Soviet Union built these for 40 years straight across four different factories and shipped one in a box with basically every Zenit camera that ever left the planet. It's one of the most

mass-produced lenses in the history of the world and the reason that everybody wants one in the first place is cuz it does something wrong. If you point it at a busy background wide open, the out-of-focus stuff at the edges starts to swirl [music] and that isn't a feature and nobody designed that. It's literally a lens

failing to gather light evenly and the Soviets had no particular reason to fix it because the lens was fine, it was cheap, and it was just a throwaway lens that came free with a camera. 70 years later, there's people paying real money for adapters to put a $50 lens on their $3,000 cameras. Next on the list, we

have Canon's dream lens. In 1961, Canon released a 50 mm lens that opened up to F 0.95. The crazy part is that it wasn't made for a movie camera or for a lab, it was for a rangefinder that a person was expected to carry around and use in 1961. It was the fastest lens that you

could buy for a 35 mm camera in the world and Canon's pitch was that it could gather light four times faster than your own eye. Somewhere along the way, it picked up the name dream lens and that name stuck because it's been doing the marketing for free for the last 65 years. Now, when you shoot wide