Originally posted by dms Given my experience with this lens (and Nikon film camera) I need to speak up for this lens gem. This Vivitar Series 1 (VS1) lens was considered a professional lens and far better than the takumar 200 f/4 (on film in the 1980's and 1990's)--and that was my experience. I have the Takumar 200 f/4 and the VS1 200 f/3. And the VS1 was magical for intermediate distance large aperture portraits.
I have most of the highly thought of VS1 lenses (28 f/1.9, 90mm f/2.5, 200mm f/3 and 28-90 and 70-210 zooms) and the 200mm f/3 was my favorite.
I cannot say how it would do on digital, but none of my lenses on digital have the magic I found in two lenses on film--the VS1 200 f/3 and the (Alpa) 50 mm f/1.8 Kern Macro Switar.
I thought that perhaps the problem I was having was with the off brand Skylight filter I had on the lens so I re-shot a picture very similar to the Robin picture in my original post. (The Robin picture is a central crop of about 1700 x 800 pixels from the 3672 x 2592 K200d frame.) Sadly removing the skylight filter didn't have much effect on the purple fringing. Because purple fringing comes from optical non linearity it is possible that the optical cement used to glue the lens elements together may have degraded over the years. I would think that this lens - on a full frame digital would be a beautiful large aperture portrait lens as that use would tend to avoid the areas where I am seeing problems on my copy. I shall take some film shots with my ES II and try to report back on them when I get the film developed.
The 200mm f3.0 was an expensive lens when it was new and I know it was highly regarded in the film era.
---------- Post added 08-04-15 at 10:54 AM ----------
I have re-examined the Robin picture carefully. I think that what I am seeing is combination of things. 1. The Vivitar 200 f3.0 I own does purple fringe - a different shot which I take to look for this problem does definitely show purple fringing. 2. A large part of what is visible in the Robin picture is what is generally known as green (or blue) fringing.
Green fringing is not an optical defect in a lens, or some sort of chromatic aberration. Green fringing is a result of the fact that the left part of a lens sees a slightly different view of an object and the background than the right part of the lens does. This effect is known as parallax. It is easily seen by humans since the left eye sees a slightly different view of an object than the right eye. Hold a finger up at arms length and alternate closing your eyes. When both eyes are open your brain selects the view of the your dominant eye and maps the view of the other eye onto the dominant eye's view. You will notice with both eyes open that the edge of your finger is blurred and mixed in with the background color. A large lens aperture will cause the same effect on a sensor (film or digital).
Part of why the Vivitar 200mm f3.0 is so nice for the right kind of shot is that because the diameter of the front element is about the same as the distance between a human's eyes, it renders objects on a sensor geometrically in a very similar way to how the brain renders objects from the view provided by the eyes - this causes recognition and appreciation to occur in the viewer; the pictures have a 'natural' look to them.