Hi all, I am back to doing a 'Vintage Lesn Test' this week, after going for a sustained 'Re-Livimg The CCD Sensor' series for the past few weeks. This week's lens is the T-mount Spiratone Minitel-M 500mm 1:8 Mirror, a product launched in the 80s, which nobody seems to remember much about, nor saying much about it even on PentaxForums. The lens costs me USD 30 on the big bay.
Mirror lenses came with the cons of being only a single fixed aperture lens, a very slow one at it, and with quality that is something to be desired as well, including not being as their conventional telephoto counterparts (no, we are not thinking about Hubble here). It does have the merits, though, of being very compact and lightweight.
On the 2x crop sensor Olympus E-P5, with an equally easy-to-acquire T-mount adapter, the Spiratone Minitel 500mm 1:8 Mirror is a long throw super-telephoto with a 1000mm equivalent (35mm Full-frame) focal length, and with tweaks to the exposure settings that you can do on the camera itself, including increasing Contrast, Saturation, and Sharpness, and a little bit of Unshark Masking on the table-top, images could be just as equally impressive as I have done to mine as posted.