Novoflex 600mm comparison with Nikkor 70-300mm

[Saorsa]

My Novoflex 600mm arrived yesterday. The day was pretty dull so I took a few shots to get familiar with the operation. Low light and contrast meant that I wasn't even trying to get anything.

Today, it was a bit brighter so, I took a few shots to compare it to my Nikkor 70-300mm.

The target was a palm tree with a fair amount of detail down the street from me. This is the shot from the 70-300mm at 300mm. Fine jpg straight from the camera reduced to 800-600 for the web. No other PP.



Next, the same image cropped to approximate the 600mm field of view.



And finally, the shot from the Novoflex 600mm. I did apply a bit of brightness reduction to this one otherwise, no PP except for resizing.



The 70-300mm was handheld, the 600mm on a tripod.

I expect to get better results when I am more familiar with the lens.

[Attila]

This is not bad at all, consider this is a 600mm lens..

[cooltouch]

Both photos appear to be equivalent in terms of sharpness. The Nikkor's color and contrast is higher, and it also appears to have a bit more depth of field. This might just be due to some metering differences, though. I know that with my Canon DSLR it tends to overexpose somewhat at smaller apertures.

Really to tell, next time, do a 100% crop of the 300mm image, and a 50% crop of the 600mm image and compare them. Or upsize the 300mm image's 100% frame 2x so it's the same size as the 600mm's. And then compare the two.

[cxo]

In the 50s to 70s these lenses were among the favourites of wildlife and sports photographers.

Today, the Novoflex lenses are very good user lenses if you like to focus manually - and they are a bargain.

There are different models, the newer ones have two grips; the back grip is for focusing, the front grip has a release trigger and a plug for a cable, pretty cool with a motorized camera.

I own an older version with one grip and built-in bellows with a 5.6/280mm and 5.6/400mm head and a modern one with two grips, built-in extension tube and a 5.6/400 T-Noflexar (T is the better version) and 6.8/560 Leitz Telyt (a great lens). There was also a 5.6/560 Leitz head, it's even better, but very expensive today. All these lenses are made to be used at open aperture, stopping down does not change much.

I also have two original "TEX" converters, 1.5x and 2x. Pretty good, but you need a very stable tripod, mirror lockup and something like a loupe to enlarge what you see in the finder.

Good luck with these lenses, it takes a while to get used to them, but then they are great - especially if you can't afford a 4.0/600mm Canon USM IS lens and someone to carry it for you