Shoten has announced a new lens adapter. It’s called the Shoten L095-SE, and it lets you adapt the legendary Canon 50mm f/0.95 and other lenses from the Canon 7 Rangefinder system for Sony E Mount cameras.

Of course, it remains manual focus but lets you get that bright, super-shallow, f/0.95 depth of field on your full-frame Sony camera. Perhaps a challenging lens for stills, but it opens up some great creative options for video.

Shoten L095-SE Adapter

There isn’t a massive amount of information available about the adapter yet. Of course, it takes the Canon 50mm f/0.95 on the front end – or any other lens for the Canon 7 rangefinder – and a Sony E mount camera on the back, but what else?

From the few pictures we can see of the adapter, there don’t appear to be any electrical contacts or communications with the camera. Of course, such technology didn’t exist in lenses in 1961. But in a modern adapter? Especially a lens-specific adapter?

I would’ve perhaps hoped for a chip and pats on the bottom to communicate with the camera. Even if the lens doesn’t send out information, the adapter could still potentially send a unique identifier to the camera to store in the metadata for easier searching and sorting.

Obviously, it’s not a deal-breaker, but it would be nice to start seeing some lens adapters identifying themselves to one’s camera.

Canon 50mm f/0.95 – Legendary Glass

The Canon 50mm f/0.95 is a rare lens from 1961 for the Canon 7 rangefinder camera. When released, it had the widest aperture in the world for a photographic lens from any manufacturer. It sold in Japan at launch for 57,000 yen. With the exchange rate at the time of 360 yen per $1, that works out to around $158. In today’s money, that would be about $1,626.

A pricey lens, but not unreasonable compared to some of the expensive f/1.2 glass we find on the market today. So, if you see one for sale and are tempted, don’t hang about, or you might regret it. It could end up costing you a lot more money in the long term to wait for another.

It occasionally pops up on eBay for around $2,500 or so, but I haven’t seen one recently. Chances are, this value will increase over time as more of them find permanent homes and fewer of them become available.

If you happen to already own one, well, maybe this adapter will serve you well.

Price and Availability

A price doesn’t actually appear to have been announced yet. Shoten makes and sells a number of lens adapters on Amazon at around the $40 mark. I think we might expect the Shoten L095-SE to be about the same once it’s available to buy.

Exactly when that is is currently unclear, but I’d expect pre-order links to come up in the next few days, at least. We’ll update this post when we see more specific availability information.