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What is the WORST lens you can think of?
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PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:32 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
Oldhand wrote:
iangreenhalgh1 wrote:
The lenses being mentioned fall into two categories - plain bad and bad because they are faulty. A lot fall into the latter, such as the Jupiter-8, which is a truly superb lens but copies can vary a large amount.
.


I agree with Ian on this. There are plenty of lenses that have had a rough life and are the products of abuse - never to reproduce as they should. There are other lenses whose design was sound, but were let down by patchy quality control.
There are yet others who have quirks to their nature that have to be learnt to get the best out of them. They are not perfect and under some conditions they perform badly, but under others they perform very well. Learning how to use them can be a frustration but if they are used in situations that avoid showing their weaknesses, they can shine. The Domiplan is one of these - or at least can be.
Then there are the real dogs, that were dogs when they left the factory and no amount of TLC can bring them - Lazarus like - from the tomb. They just stink.
These are the lenses that we should group here.
OH


+1

I had a Vivitar S1 2.3/135, a known good lens, but mine was utterly rotten - poor QC lifts it's ugly head there as this copy was mint like new.

I also had a Tokina 3.5/17 that was really bad, but that was due to the hard life it had lead as the other two copies I own are superb and this is a lens that is well known for it's excellence - this is a case of abuse ruining IQ

I think the lenses we are largely talking about as stinkers are from the age when most people were shooting cheap colour print film and only seeing their work in the form of cheap 6x4 machine prints. The stuff that was produced for the cheaper end of the market back then could be bloody awful, but could also be surprisingly decent. Let's list the awful stuff.

One stinker I remember well was a Cosina 3.8/20, severely decentred so that the right side, even on APS-C was a blurry mess jd the coatings were completely ineffective, just the brightness of the sky in the top of the frame induced veiling flare that crushed contrast and saturation. Just a rotten lens all-round.


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
Minolfan wrote:
sir_c wrote:
Also the Pentacon 29/2.8 is not a lens I would recommend. Better use their 50mm and use a pano stitcher to get wide-angle pics.


Another lens that is not bad by design.
I have one, making it impossible to get any really sharp picture.
Annoyance let me spent € 3,- on another one at a thrift market and, surprise, that copy is very good!
The outside of the lenses looks identical good, no bad handling to suppose.


I've had two or three copies, the issue seems to be field curvature, which means the edges of the image were poor until the aperture was closed down tof5.6 and even then lagged behind the centre.


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
My Vivitar 17/3.5, n. 37XXXX Tokina made, at any aperture has little or nothing sharpness, low resolution, high geometric distortion, false color, double incidence CA... a real gem! Also I throw out as trash a Yashica 80-200.

Happy shots! (but no with these lenses)


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
anktonio wrote:
My Vivitar 17/3.5, n. 37XXXX Tokina made, at any aperture has little or nothing sharpness, low resolution, high geometric distortion, false color, double incidence CA... a real gem! Also I throw out as trash a Yashica 80-200.

Happy shots! (but no with these lenses)


Then again I have the Soligor version of the 17/3.5 (same lens, made by Tokina) and it's a fine lens! I suspect yours is faulty.


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
iangreenhalgh1 wrote:
Oldhand wrote:
iangreenhalgh1 wrote:
The lenses being mentioned fall into two categories - plain bad and bad because they are faulty. A lot fall into the latter, such as the Jupiter-8, which is a truly superb lens but copies can vary a large amount.
.


I agree with Ian on this. There are plenty of lenses that have had a rough life and are the products of abuse - never to reproduce as they should. There are other lenses whose design was sound, but were let down by patchy quality control.
There are yet others who have quirks to their nature that have to be learnt to get the best out of them. They are not perfect and under some conditions they perform badly, but under others they perform very well. Learning how to use them can be a frustration but if they are used in situations that avoid showing their weaknesses, they can shine. The Domiplan is one of these - or at least can be.
Then there are the real dogs, that were dogs when they left the factory and no amount of TLC can bring them - Lazarus like - from the tomb. They just stink.
These are the lenses that we should group here.
OH


+1

I had a Vivitar S1 2.3/135, a known good lens, but mine was utterly rotten - poor QC lifts it's ugly head there as this copy was mint like new.

I also had a Tokina 3.5/17 that was really bad, but that was due to the hard life it had lead as the other two copies I own are superb and this is a lens that is well known for it's excellence - this is a case of abuse ruining IQ

I think the lenses we are largely talking about as stinkers are from the age when most people were shooting cheap colour print film and only seeing their work in the form of cheap 6x4 machine prints. The stuff that was produced for the cheaper end of the market back then could be bloody awful, but could also be surprisingly decent. Let's list the awful stuff.

One stinker I remember well was a Cosina 3.8/20, severely decentred so that the right side, even on APS-C was a blurry mess jd the coatings were completely ineffective, just the brightness of the sky in the top of the frame induced veiling flare that crushed contrast and saturation. Just a rotten lens all-round.


I tried the Cosina made 20/3.8 on full frame and it was downright awful! Two thirds of the image were a CA and mush fest and the middle wasn't sharp until you stopped down quite a bit Laughing


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:43 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
Well, I think we can chalk the Cosina 3.8/20 up as a stinker then. A certain member here really tore into me in a childish way once for suggesting this lens wasn't good, so there might be some decent copies about.

The Tokina 3.5/17 however, if someone has a bad copy, they were just unlucky as there is no doubt it is a fine lens.


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 11:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
anktonio wrote:
My Vivitar 17/3.5, n. 37XXXX Tokina made, at any aperture has little or nothing sharpness, low resolution, high geometric distortion, false color, double incidence CA... a real gem! Also I throw out as trash a Yashica 80-200.

Happy shots! (but no with these lenses)


Perhaps you're using a different camera , possibly full frame? but my Tokina 17 / 3.5 is excellent on the Sony A6000 and NEX5, one of my favourite lenses, And one of my favourite zooms is the Yashica ML 80-200 / 4, which has given me some excellent, sharp, pictures.

Maybe it also comes down to age and condition of these old lenses, even if they are in excellent cosmetic condition they might have dropped sometime onto a semi hard surface like a wood floor, that didn't do visible damage but decentered the glass? And of course there's the vagaries of quality control from manufacture.


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 12:19 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
ManualFocus-G wrote:
Then again I have the Soligor version of the 17/3.5 (same lens, made by Tokina) and it's a fine lens! I suspect yours is faulty.

Yes, this should be.

Lloydy wrote:
Perhaps you're using a different camera , possibly full frame? but my Tokina 17 / 3.5 is excellent on the Sony A6000 and NEX5, one of my favourite lenses, And one of my favourite zooms is the Yashica ML 80-200 / 4, which has given me some excellent, sharp, pictures.

Maybe it also comes down to age and condition of these old lenses, even if they are in excellent cosmetic condition they might have dropped sometime onto a semi hard surface like a wood floor, that didn't do visible damage but decentered the glass? And of course there's the vagaries of quality control from manufacture.

I never used the Yashica 80-200/4 on digital camera, this many years ago, I bought it new. And yes, I only used Vivitar 17/3.5 on M4/3... may be for this reason that the results are really bad? I'll save it for use in an upcoming FF.

Thanks and happy shots!


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 12:28 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
It occurs to me that QC must be a rather costly process as it seems that it is QC where costs have been cut in the cheaper lenses. I mean, Zeiss, Leitz, Schneider, Rodenstock and even Zeiss Jena are known for not having produced many duds, whereas the cheapest stuff made by companies like Cosina, Ozone, Samyang, Sun etc. is known to be all over the shop with duds aplenty. Yet if the QC process had been properly applied, then there is little doubt that some if not most of the cheaper items could have been produced without so many duds. Samyang today seem to have almost no QC, yet a good copy of their lenses is a wonderful thing. So it seems to me that it is in QC where costs are cut when it comes to mass production of consumer goods like camera lenses.


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 5:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
The 24-624mm (equivalent) zoom on a Fujifilm X-S1.
Awful lens to befit a thoroughly disappointing camera; got a refund from Fuji when its electronics failed after a couple of months.
Droop on the lens was so bad -- and it got worse with use -- that with the camera body fixed on a tripod, at approximately a hundred yards the image area could be deflected by a couple of yards left, right, up or down. Auto-focus was hopelessly vague, images from the camera were somewhat mushy, and the lens was not convincingly sharp at any setting.


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 6:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
Anything Hanimex.


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 8:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
Vivitar 200mm f/4. I`ve had two, and I didn`t like them so I gave them away...


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 8:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
Most bad experience come from faulty items, but... I remember for a few what I did not even bring back to home, just throw it away in next trash can.


PostPosted: Fri Mar 06, 2015 8:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
Laughing Laughing


PostPosted: Sat Mar 07, 2015 12:03 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
Jesito wrote:
No one has mentioned yet the Domiplan 50mm f/2.8?
It's a fantastic and cheap lens to give the colleagues to disassemble when I do a repair class Wink


Let's not be too unkind - you can make 'moody' images with it -


PostPosted: Sun Mar 08, 2015 10:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
My worst, probably the sigma 180mm macro apo f5.6. Too slow to use as a general 180mm, bought for macro use with flash but suffered really badly with flare despite its large hood. Made it pretty much useless to me and I went back to normal lenses with extension tubes.


PostPosted: Mon Mar 09, 2015 4:42 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
I have a new worst. A while back I bought a used Samyang 800mm f/8 mirror lens. It was huge and like new. But when I went to use it, I discovered that it was incapable of being brought into sharp focus. It just went from blurry to less blurry. Totally unusable.

I bought it because I have seen many photographs taken with this lens so I know it has the potential for being a very sharp optic. But I suspect that Samyang's quality control is not the best, and occasionally a turkey slips through -- like the one I bought. I returned it and bought a Tamron 55BB 500mm f/8 instead. 300mm shorter, but much sharper.


PostPosted: Mon Mar 09, 2015 12:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
For me, the Jupiter-8M in Kiev mount takes the cake. Granted, I use mine reversed on a focusing helicoid adapter (I thankfully didn't spend any time or money trying to find a Kiev-NEX adapter) but I don´t think that affects sharpness to such a degree that it would render a perfectly fine lens into this Monstrosity of Softness.

It sharpens up once stopped down to 5.6-8 and contrast also increases dramatically while doing so, and I guess if you like the dreamy/artsy look, it can be quite nice. Wide open it's so soft it's really hard to focus, even with 14 X magnification on the rear LCD; it literally is like having smeared vaseline on the lens.
Quick testshot (showing some "trioplan-esque" soapbubble bokeh on the OOF highlights)

Softest lens yet (Jupiter-8M) by scepticswe, on Flickr


PostPosted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 5:37 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
Your soap-bubble-like bokeh remind me of the bokeh I get from my Canon FD 50mm f/1.4 when shot wide open at f/1.4. It's a very sharp lens, but its bokeh are also very well defined as well. Trioplanesque, eh? Hmm, I've never used a Trioplan.



PostPosted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 9:31 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
Gardener wrote:
Anything Hanimex.


My only Hanimex, a 28, is currently being used as a body cap on an old Zenit in my display case. It's perfectly good. Laughing


PostPosted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 9:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
That soft J8M is an exception rather than the rule. However, the later M version is not quite as sharp as the earlier J8.

I have a Hanimex 28mm in M42, it's in my parts box, nothing wrong with it but the IQ renders it useful only as a source of parts to fix other lenses. Field curvature means the edges are rotten until stopped down to f5.6 where dof masks the curvature. Even then, it's not very sharp anywhere.


PostPosted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 11:29 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
I have two Hanimex lenses.. one Hanimex 3.5/180mm and a Hanimex-Tamron Nestar 6.9/400mm

Both are damn good lenses!


Hanimex didn't build lenses... they only rebranded and sold them. You can't say anything Hanimex was crap.. this isn't the full story.


PostPosted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 11:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
Tedat wrote:
I have two Hanimex lenses.. one Hanimex 3.5/180mm and a Hanimex-Tamron Nestar 6.9/400mm

Both are damn good lenses!


Hanimex didn't build lenses... they only rebranded and sold them. You can't say anything Hanimex was crap.. this isn't the full story.


I'm sure there are decent Hanimex lenses, as you say they rebranded them from various sources. But the 28 / 2.8 is a stinker! Mad


PostPosted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 11:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
and I'm pretty sure it's not the only stinker from Hanimex Wink


PostPosted: Wed Mar 11, 2015 1:15 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
Putting "hanimex 28 M42" into Google images reveals at least 5 different lenses were sold under this brand. If one has to be bad, then my vote goes to Korean (early Samyang) model. Then possibly Makinon. Whereas SUN, Tokina and Cimko are definitely good lenses.
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