Vivitar 400mm f/5.6 - Komine - high ISO shots

ManualFocus-G · Expire: 2014-11-24

I'm about to sell this one, so thought I should give it a run out, given that I've barely used it over the past year. I'd pretty much written it off as useful since buying a Canon 300/4L Sad

But, to my surprise, it's actually pretty decent wide open!

First two shots at f/5.6 ISO 2500-3200 40% unsharp mask at 0.5px and contrast boost, cleaned with Topaz Denoise

This one with an old Vivitar 2x teleconverter, making it f/11, at ISO 5000 and again the same pp

I'm impressed with both the lens and the Topaz Denoise plugin for Photoshop Shocked

SXR_Mark · Joined: 12 Jun 2010 Posts: 506 Location: England

Very nice results. i'm surprised to see so little CA, especially in the shot with the TC.

Is this not the same lens as reviewed in the main part of the site?

To quote there:

"Image quality is rather poor: soft at f5,6 and slightly better at f8, acceptable sharpness at f11. Chromatic Aberrations (CA) are terrible: awful red fringing on almost all pictures (see samples)"

I think Revers has also posted decent results with this lens.

ForenSeil · Joined: 15 Apr 2011 Posts: 2726 Location: Kiel, Germany.

The second shot looks very good for the conditions.
Maybe the reviewer mentioned in the link had a faulty lens with an loose element.
Or did Topaz Software remove most CAs in PP?

I like to see a shot with this lens with a lower ISO JPEG withot any PP

ManualFocus-G · Expire: 2014-11-24

I've found that you need to nail the focus with this lens, or indeed you get red fringing. It's not massively sharp at f/5.6 but sharpens up nicely in pp. f/8 is definitely better, but alas we have nowhere near enough light for these sort of lenses in Britain at the moment Laughing

revers · Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2012 4:14 pm Post subject:

martinsmith99 · Expire: 2013-11-18

I think you are right to sell this lens.