Badness of Vivitar 500mm mirror lens

I had an example of this lens for a (very) short time. No scans to show you, but it has about 3 stops of falloff between center and edge. No sharpness to speak of, no contrast. Bad lens, very bad.

I haven't used the Vivitar, but I did have a Samyang 500 mirror lens, in a similar price range. It was awful. I have a 400/6.3 preset glass lens which gives excellent (though bulky and inconvenient) results, and I have had better luck with mirror lenses in the 250- 300mm range than I had with the 500.

I tried several 500mm mirrors, and even with super careful focusing, tripods, high speed films,mirror locked up, you name it, couldn't get a sharp image. I can't believe they even sell those things! The cheapo 500mm presets for about the same money are way sharper, if you can live with the thing being as long as your arm and the 33 feet minimum focus.

In 1970 I used a Perkin-Elmer 800mm catadioptric (mirror) lens, mostly for test and messing around purposes. It belonged to the US Army, and I was in counter intelligence. The Perkin-Elmer produced edge-to-edge sharpness and exposure consistency. From about a block away, I could read the label on a suntan lotion bottle (the picture was of my wife at the base pool).

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You get what you pay for. The Perkin-Elmer was very expensive. The Vivitar/Phoenix/Soligor is inexpensive. These small lenses were originally developed for unobtrusive street photography and other places where weight and size was important. However, the object was to get decent, recognizable images. If we are going to subject them to detailed testing, they won't hold up to their big glass counterparts.