I bought a cheap Opteka 500mm mirror lens off eBay and the UPS package finally arrived on Wednesday after two days of failed delivery attempts. Hooray!
500mm in a box.
I was surprised to see so many items after opening the box – the lens, a carrying bag, a T-mount adapter for my Olympus and three filters (Skylight, ND 2X and ND 4X).
Inside the box.
The lens construction was all metal and felt solid. I installed the Skylight filter anyway. I don’t think I’ll use the ND filters anytime soon unless I start shooting the Sun. I took some shots around the house just to test the lens. It was a real challenge as a small vibration would get your photos all blurred. Here’s what I learnt:
- Fast shutter speeds (less than 1/100) produces sharper images than slow shutter speeds (1″ or more). I suspect that the shutter makes the camera vibrate slightly on the tripod, but this gets magnified by the 500mm lens blurring the image.
- You’ll have to be very patient to find the right focus. On my camera, the viewfinder produced better results than live view. I believe some image processing during resizing didn’t show the focus accurately.
- Taking pictures a stop down from normal exposure (i.e. faster shutter) gave sharper results. You would be better off correcting the photos in an image editing software.
Here’s two shots taken using my Olympus E-420 and two different lenses, just for comparison. Note that the photo taken using the 500mm mirror lens was digitally enhanced because it was taken at an exposure level of -2.0.
Photo taken with Olympus 14-54mm lens at f/7.1
Photo taken with Opteka 500mm mirror lens at f/8.0