>>3137139Photography was always a side business for Soviet/Russian optics manufacturers, their bread and butter is military shit.
>Are these lenses out yet, as in, are there youtube reviews and stuff like that?They've been out for a while, you can google samples. Unsurprisingly, the new Helios-40-2 is exactly the same as the old Soviet one, the only difference is that it's now available in F and EF mounts natively.
> nasty outlined bokeh wide open and sharp around f/4 to f/5.6The bokeh is actually fairly decent. Helios-40-2 is very soft, but has a characteristic "swirly" bokeh that made it so desirable for bokeh whores all over the world (but also ironically was one of the reasons why Zeiss dropped Biotar decades ago). The new Zenitar 50/1.2 and 85/1.4 have less swirly bokeh and are sharper, but still a far cry from Sigma Art and such. I suspect that they're not actually new designs, but unreleased Soviet ones they dug up from the archives.
