A Famous Lens Reality Check: Soft, Wild, and Sometimes Perfect

A lens can be “bad” on paper and still be exactly the look you keep trying to fake in post. This video focuses on a vintage 85mm f/1.5 that keeps showing up in portraits and video because it does something modern lenses usually avoid.

Coming to you from Christopher Frost, this oddly practical video puts the KMZ Helios 40-2 85mm f/1.5 under real pressure instead of romanticizing it. You get the quick backstory on why it has a cult following and why a reissue happened years after the originals, with a few physical variations that matter if you are shopping used. Frost walks through the handling reality: it is big, heavy, fully manual, and built like a metal brick. If you have ever bought an old lens because the internet promised “character,” this is the part that keeps you from wasting money on something you will hate using. The focus ring stiffness on this copy is not a small complaint if you plan to pull focus, and the visible focus breathing changes how your footage feels shot to shot.

Then Frost moves into image testing on the Canon EOS R5, and he does not pretend it turns into a modern portrait lens when you stop down. Wide open at f/1.5, you see softness, low contrast, and obvious purple fringing, plus corners that fall apart in a way you cannot crop your way out of. Stop down and the center firms up, but the overall look stays gentle, and the corners only start behaving much later than most people expect. That matters if you are used to shooting events or environmental portraits where the background needs to hold together. It also matters if you deliver raw files to a client who expects clean edges and punchy contrast without a lot of work. You also get notes on vignetting and distortion, including the surprising part that distortion is not the main problem, which is not what most people assume with vintage glass.

Where the video gets interesting is how Frost treats flare and out-of-focus backgrounds as the real reason this lens exists in 2026. You see flare show up fast, sometimes when you want it and sometimes when you do not, and you get a clearer sense of how easily it can hijack a scene. If you shoot backlit portraits, you will recognize the risk right away, especially if you rely on consistency across a set. The bokeh can go swirly and busy, and it can also look smooth in a way that feels more like an effect than a blur. That makes it useful when the location is boring and you need the background to carry mood without adding props or changing lighting. Frost also flags chromatic aberration that hangs around until about f/5.6, which can turn high-contrast details into color outlines if you are not careful with wardrobe, hair, or reflective surfaces. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Frost.