Okay, I picked up one of these from eBay recently -- the price was right (about $50), and even if it turned out to be a lemon, I thought it would be useful to get my feet wet in extreme tele. (The second-longest lens I have is the ubiquitous Tamron 70-300 purple monster.)
There's not much information on this lens available on the net. So I'll give you my impressions here (and yes, I'll file a lens review once I have a more solid opinion of it).
Here are some snapshots of the beast itself:
Yeah, it's big. Not the biggest -- nothing like that ridiculous Sigma lens that looks like a green trashcan -- but big enough.
No pictures WITH the lens yet . . . I'll post some a little later, maybe tonight . . . but results so far have been mixed.
It's a preset lens with the familiar dual aperture ring. One has click-stops, the other moves smoothly between the selected stop and wide open. I like this design; it's easy to use, and I'm used to it with my Takumar 200mm f/3.5 and Peleng 17mm fisheye. It has a LOT of diaphragm blades, maybe 15-20, and the aperture is always a nice perfect circle.
I don't know what the filter thread size is officially -- a quick ruler measurement says 90mm or so. It comes with a screw-in metal hood to make it even longer, and the diameter at the end of the hood is about 96mm.
It's quite heavy -- all brass and glass, and very difficult to use hand-held. It's difficult to focus, even on a tripod (it does, thankfully, have a tripod mount). My split image focusing screen is almost entirely blacked out even at f/6.3. And handheld, it's very hard to hold it steady enough to eyeball the focus -- stuff jiggles around a lot.
Infinity focus isn't at the end of the focus ring travel. In fact, it's pretty far short of the end. That's OK -- it would be worse if it didn't get to infinity -- but it would also be nice to be able to just slam the ring to the stop and grab a photo of a distant mountain/airplane/UFO/whatever. I haven't tried taking it apart to rectify this yet. Simply loosening the setscrews on the focus ring didn't get me anywhere.
That having been said, I occasionally have been getting decent pictures from it. Getting sharp ones is a challenge, with the focusing issues, and probably a fair amount of operator imprecision as well. So I have had a lot of rejects and only a few keepers.
It's particularly hard at f/6.3. DOF is pretty shallow there, and I have a hunch the lens is a little soft wide open anyway, even under the best circumstances. It's going to take a little more work to confirm whether it's the lens or my focusing that makes f/6.3 such an ordeal. Stopped down to f/8 or f/11, it's much easier.
I'll sort through what photos I have and post some in a bit.
Last edited by Quicksand; 01-16-2009 at 12:09 PM.
Reason: Adding photos in subsequent message