Spiratone Minitel-M 500mm f/8 Mirror, First Impression

Digital Moments: Image making with a T-mount Spiratone Minitel-M 500mm f/8 Mirror, first impression.

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Hi all, I am back to doing a presentation for 'The Vintage Enthusiast' this week, after going for a series of 'CCD Resurgence' posts for the past few weeks. This week's lens is the T-mount Spiratone Minitel-M 500mm f/8 Mirror, a product launched in the 80s, which nobody seems to remember much about, nor say 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 that, and with quality that is something to be desired as well, including not being as good 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.

Olympus E-P5, Spiratone Minitel-M 500mm f/8 Mirror

On the 2x crop sensor Olympus E-P5, with an equally easy-to-acquire T-mount adapter, the Spiratone Minitel 500mm f/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 Unsharpen Masking on the table-top, images could be just as impressive as I have done to mine as posted.

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