Bargain Lens............

[Kelley (Texas)]

Recently I spotted a vintage Soligor 200mm F3.5 lens on eBay that only had a few bids, and decided to place a low price bid on it. I figured that it was worth a try if I won the eBay auction with my low bid. Well, I was surprised when the auction ended and I won the auction.

When the lens arrived I was delighted, it was as described, beautiful condition, mint like new.

That afternoon I headed for our patio deck to take a few test pictures with my new lens. I would have loved to have gone out into the field for a test, but I am still recovering from my broken neck from an accident in March of this year. I mounted the Soligor lens to a tripod and took about two dozen pictures. Unfortunately, I was disappointed in the results, the pictures were not very sharp and it took a lot of work with my photo editing program to get a reasonable barely acceptable picture with this lens. This lens was far inferior when compared to the vintage Minolta lenses that I usually use. I am going to put it on a shelf until I can eventually get out in the field to take some test pictures with it. I suspect that this lens will not be a keeper, but I will give it another try and see what happens. Fortunately, I did not pay very much for it. I might add that I did have fun messing around with it even if I was disappointed in the test results.

the first picture was taken with my Sony NEX-6 camera with the following settings on the Soligor 200mm F3.5 lens: F11, 1/50, ISO 400, "Daylight" white balance, Manual Focus, Manual Mode. As stated earlier, I used a tripod to take this picture. The second picture was edited using some special effects in my photo editing software. Kelley (Texas)

 

[Roscue2]

I have never heard of Soligor until right now. Was it an inexpensive lens even back then? Not implying that you made a bad buy or anything Kelley, just thinking about how many times lesser recognized brands of cameras and other products tend to be that way for a reason. Even with the hiking gear that I buy I run into this a lot. I could spend $100 on a nice Camelbak hydration pack, or go to Walmart and buy the Outdoor Products hydration pack for $29.99. Sometimes the lower price gear works out just fine, other times not so much.

Interesting subject BTW. The second photo was tripping me out for a while. I too noticed the blurry words on the cans in the first photo.

 

[Kelley (Texas)]

Both were not manufacturers and sublet the lens to other manufacturers and then put their name on them. Some were decent lenses, others produced poor pictures.

Below are two pictures, one taken with the Soligor 200mm lens, and one taken with a Minolta 75-200mm lens. The Minolta picture is better than the one taken with the bargain Soligor lens. It took a lot of photo editing to make a decent picture of the one taken with the Soligor lens, but very little editing of the picture taken with the Minolta lens. The first picture is the picture taken with the Soligor lens and the second picture was taken with the Minolta lens. Kelley (Texas)