I also have an old AE-1 body... that was my own first "new" camera (before that all my cameras were used). My AE-1 is still working great after all these years (though I did have to put a drop of oil on the mirror flywheel to resolve the famous AE-1 "shutter squeak.")
Alas... my AE-1 now sits on the shelf as a bit of nostalgia... along with it's lenses.
There are adapters to mount the lenses... there are also "conversions" to change the mount. But as has already been pointed out, there are actually more reasons why you would NOT want to use these lenses than there are reasons in favor of using them.
The old glass does not compete very well against the new glass. As an interesting aside... Lomography is now making a replica (well... that's a stretch because it's not an exact replica -- many liberties were taken with the physical design) ... of an 1860 Petzval lens. The lens is not just "manual" focus... it's got a rack and pinion focusing system with a knob on the bottom of the lens (not a ring). It has no aperture blades... it has Waterhouse stops ... a set of metal slides, each having a hole of a different diameter, accompanies the lens. When you determine what f-stop you want to use, you find the correctly labeled Waterhouse stop and insert it into a slot on the top of the lens. The lens barrel is brass -- as it would have been in 1860. But they do put a modern EOS mount on it (non-electronic). They also make a Nikon mount version.
The resulting images you get... aren't nearly as sharp as you'd get with a modern lens. And that's basically the point. The optical nuances of this particular lens are that it's actually reasonably sharp in the center, but strongly drops off as you get away from the center axis... but in a very peculiar way. If one were to imaging drawing concentric circles around the center axis of the lens, the blur is considerably stronger in the direction following the curvature of the circles then it is in the direction going from center to the outsides. This creates a very interesting looking "swirling" or "cruved" background blur (bokeh) which some photographers find highly desirable -- even though the topics of the lens aren't really all that great.
Really though... if and when you ever decide to use old glass... definitely don't do it to save money. It's mostly a nostalgia thing.
If one wants to save money, Canon makes a few lenses which are rather economically priced (the 50mm f/1.8 and the 75-300mm come to mind). But it should not be a surprise that these are not exactly their top performing lenses. I think it's great that they produce lenses with a goal of making the photography more affordable to more people. The better lenses are, of course, preferred and will outperform -- but cost more.
Canon revamped their EF-S 18-55mm kit lens as well as their 18-135mm and 55-250mm lenses as well. These lenses now come in an "STM" (stepper motor) version. But these aren't really the same lenses with a newer focusing motor... the whole lens is changed and the optical performance is improved. The "STM" variant for each of these is about $50 more than the non-STM version. But I think it's $50 well-spent considering the improvements to optical performance as well as the faster and quieter focus. They also use internal focusing. The front of the lens used to rotate when you focused the 18-55 and 55-250mm lenses. That might not seem like a big deal... until you put a polarizer on the lens and realize that every time you tweak focus you have to reach forward and re-tuned the polarization angle. None of the new STM lenses rotate when you focus.
Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da
