400mm Spiratone

[staplermofo]

I picked up a Spiratone 400mm lens on ebay.

It completely disassembles, everything. You can pop out each individual lens element, and there are only 4 (which is nice, because they were all really dirty).
My place is too small to shoot anything with it properly inside, so I’m running off to take some samples now… but

It seems reasonably sharp and smooth (for a $50 lens that’s older than I am).
It occurred to me that maybe, just maybe, I could take it to lenscrafters or wherever and get the anti-glare coating they put on glasses on the internal lens elements (which have none right now), and that would somehow magically make it a reasonably nice lens.

Any thoughts?
(“Shut up! Stop clogging the forum with your stupid ideas! You’re not smart or clever! We’re all sick of you, just go away!” counts as a thought. If it needs to be said, it’s worth saying.)

[Curious]

your small font comment notwithstanding that seems like a good idea. it might reduce the light slightly but with TTL metering — so what.

let us know what the test results are.

[SilverStag]

Wow, I had one of those years ago… fixed f/8, right?

[staplermofo]

Wow, I had one of those years ago… fixed f/8, right?

Nope, it’s f/6.3 ~ f/32, and assuming you have really steady hands you can choose anything at all in between.

I’m pretty sure I put it back together wrong, the closest I could focus was a heck of a lot further than the 8′ listed. That, and I could focus past the moon. 400mm is pretty far and all, but I don’t think I’ll be shooting too much that’s further than the moon.

http://www.staplermofo.com/farktography/400m1.jpg
http://www.staplermofo.com/farktography/400mm2.jpg

If any detail was lost in going to 1500×1000, I can’t see it.
It’s not as stunning as I was hoping, hopefully because I messed up reassembly some how.
The good news is that it probably makes a halfway decent baseball bat.

[SilverStag]

Well, in my defense, it was 30 years ago that I had mine… I used to use it on a shoulder-buttstock camera mount that made the whole getup look like one of those National-Geographic wildlife telephoto rigs they used to use. I just had the thought that it would be 600mm equivalent on a 1.5 crop-factor DSLR.

[staplermofo]

I finally found a place that would coat them, (apparently some coatings only work on some glass, and lots of other hassles on top of the “But… we don’t sell those…”). So I got the cheapest, quickest coating they had and a complimentary polishing, and a whole lot of strange looks.

The difference is not magic.
http://www.staplermofo.com/farktography/400mmc3.jpg
I had to shoot at ISO 1600, so it’s grainy and oversharpened, but it seems like the lens is every so slightly better now.

Sooo, if I got a lens hood for this mofo, would it be better to get a 72mm threaded one and hook it up directly, or a 58mm hood slapped on a step-down ring (which I’ll be using anyway since all my filters are 58mm)? The 1.6fov crop should mean stepping down as far as 45mm would be ok, but there’s a world of minor difference I don’t understand and probably never will.

[Author]

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