>I've long been fascinated with mirror (reflex) lenses, for their small
>length and light weight for a given focal length.
>
>However, they have trade-offs, such as no diaphram (and thus, no control
>over depth-of-field and limited shutter-speed options), light fall-off in
>the edges, and distorted out-focus highlights.
>
>How does the Olympus 500/8 mirror stack up against others from Sigma,
>Vivitar, Tokina, Tamron, et. al.? Anyone have one of these beasts?
>
>I'd expect an Olympus anything to be smaller and lighter that the
>competition, but at 590g (according to Farrar's Olympus Lens page), it's
>nearly twice as heavy (and expensive!) as Cambridge Camera's Cambron 500/8.
>
>What about telescopes and spotting scopes, such as Meade's or Celestron's?
>Are these credible as lenses?
>
>Do *you* have a mirror lens? Does it get used as much as your refracting
>teles and zooms? What problems has it solved? What problems does it
>introduce? For what situations is it ideal? What situations find it
>wanting, and why?
>
>This might seem minimally related to Olympus, except the compact,
>lightweight nature of reflex lenses seems to suit the Olympus philosophy
>well.
>
>: Jan Steinman <mailto:jans@xxxxxxxxxxx>
>: 19280 Rydman Court, West Linn, OR 97068-1331 USA
>: +1.503.635.3229
>
The lens test on Lee's webpage does a comparison of the Oly lens,
unfortunately to some third party lenses. Usually the biggest criticisms of
mirror lenses are the lack of contrast and the little donut rings caused by
specular highlights when catching reflections in the frame. I did see a
dramatic comparison years ago at a Leica seminar comparing slides taken
with a Leitz refracting 1000mm lens and a Nikon 1000 mirror lens. The Nikon
looked truly awful compared to the refracting lens primarily because of
lack of resolution, contrast and poor color rendition. The point of the
demo was not to trash Nikon, but to trash the idea of mirror lenses, which
Leitz did not make.
In the comparison test on Lee's page the Oly has pretty good contrast
ratings within the mirror lens rating system.
Winsor
Winsor Crosby
Long Beach, California
mailto:wincros@xxxxxxxxxxx
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