UPDATED: RIP LMEA7: Do not buy a discounted TECHART in eBay. I should have known better.

UPDATE: The ebay retailer I purchased the adapter from (at a discounted $200 so they may not be legit in retrospect) has stopped communicating with me and is no longer assisting with this. They had arranged for it to be repaired by TECHART and as of 1/6/2020, but I have heard nothing since. Suspecting this would happen I purchased another from an online retailer and moved on with my life after marking this up as “there is no free lunch” with a touch of “if it sounds too good to be true it likely is too good to be true”.

I really enjoyed the TECHART LMEA7. Up to this point I heartily endorsed it. But it broke.

Hard to endorse something that no longer works.

No foul weather. No lens that was too heavy. No abuse. No common issues seen online that I had dreaded like lens wobble, screws backing out, or getting stuck on the camera. A whole new failure I can find no reference for. It simply stopped moving. You can feel a faint thunk like it is trying to move then nothing. Still has power. If you manually focus the lens properly the focus confirmation lights up on the screen and the shutter can be activated. But no AF.

Quite the buzzkill actually. I really liked this thing. With having lasted this long I had lulled myself into a false sense of security that I had one of the “good” samples.

Nope.

Deeply disappointed. Bought a number of M Mount lenses based on having this adapter.

Have emailed TECHART twice for advice with no response. With such a small company I am not sure they will get back to me. But with this, I must re-evaluate my next steps.

I recently came off of a wedding shoot where my more conventional primes performed so well that I must consider ditching this adapted AF lens experiment altogether.

I had seriously thought of just buying another LM EA7, but as much as I enjoyed this adapter that just makes no sense having not heard back from them. And there is the serious risk of having two dead adapters and a significant crater in my wallet at the end of it all.

Now looks like their “Contact Us” link routes back to their home page. That’s new. For now, I will be keeping my M mount lenses, but they may go as well. Definitely can no longer endorse this adapter if this is the end. No regrets. It was fun. I will update this post if I do hear from TECHART, but for right now my two adapter (Contax G before this one) TECHART AF adapter odyssey will be drawing to a close.

At least I will always have my Flickr album to remind me of what was.

Nope. As mentioned above I have already purchased another adapter.