Part of the fun in getting a new camera or lens is testing it out. I have all the primes from my film camera and they performed as expected, but I was curious to see what I would get with my old beater lens. It is an old 1970's era Vivitar 85-205mm Auto Tele-Zoom. I picked it up cheap in the late 1990's. I never used it much; I had it around just in case I needed it. Old zoom lenses tended to get a bad rap years ago and this is still the case. So I tested it. All images were taken with a Skylight 1a filter, ISO 400, and Neutral Picture Style and the lens at the 205mm setting.
I took this one a month ago. I had the camera with me in the car, the window was down, I pulled into the driveway and this guy was standing roughly 9 feet from me. Exposure info 1/400@f22. Slight adjustment in Pix to compensate for the underexposure.
The cat likes sitting on the dining room floor. I caught him from a distance of 6 feet. Fortunately I get good natural light from the window. Exposure info 1/[email protected]. RAW file exported as a JPEG, no corrections.
This is the real test here. It is also a good example of when NOT to use an old zoom. You can download the image and enlarge it. The automobiles in the foreground came out alright, but the the bricks of the buildings all show some distortion. It becomes particularly bad for the office building in the distance. The lamp posts on the right seem to vary in diameter; this is not the case in person or with any of my other lenses. As far as color is concerned, this lens tends to be cool and not very contrasty. In all fairness to the lens, I took this picture yesterday while there still was some haze left over from the Canadian wildfires. Exposure info 1/400@f11. The RAW file converted to JPEG with no modifications.
In conclusion, this old lens can give reasonably good results when shooting from a distance of 250 feet or less irrespective of focal length adjustment. Colors, contrast and exposure issues can be corrected on a computer, if necessary. It fails horribly when zooming in on distant subjects. Image this post in order to give an example of the disadvantages of using very old zoom lenses.
Your response was exactly the kind that I was trying to evoke. As far as the parking lot is concerned, everything is in focus, including the distant building. The problem is that this old lens distorts the image; the office building and the lamp posts appear to have a jagged edge. I have a cropped shot here which will better demonstrate this. A lens of more recent vintage would probably do a better job.
Having said that, I encourage people to try out their old lenses on their new cameras; they may like the results or they may discover some optical flaw. Testing on a scene such as mine is the key; it would be shame to spend good money on a vacation just to discover the photos of it are lousy on account of a cheap old lens.
