Playing With Lenses: Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the best lens of them all? RMC Tokina 500mm 1:8

Cost: 48.51$ (average market price $70)

I have been looking forward to try a true mirror lens. Not that I had high expectations, but it is for sure something different. Impressive tele, light weight… what is there not to like. A lot, it seems.

OK, what is a mirror lens? Mirror lenses are telephoto lenses that use a combination of two mirrors to reflect light back and forth between the ends of the lens prior to the light passing through to the camera.

Source: Wayne Grundy's PhotoTech Blog

This means that the physical size of the lens is around a third of the size of a conventional lens and the mirrors are also much lighter than the optical glass enabling the lens to be hand hold with an appropriately fast shutter speed. And chromatic aberration is virtually absent by design.
Mirrors are significantly cheaper than conventional long telephotos, and much easier to carry. Almost all major brand once had mirror lenses in their product range, such as Pentax, Sony, Nikon, Minolta, Zeis, etc.. Today, you can still find new, cheaply priced, mirror lenses from the likes of Kenko, Opteka, Rokinin, Polaroid, Samyang and others.

Mirror lenses do come with a set of disadvantages, such as fixed aperture (no control over depth of field), slow aperture (needs high ISO for hand held shooting, and no disk time shooting), fixed focal length, significant vignette in the corners (that can be easily removed in Lightroom), and a very messy bokeh with the typical ring shape (see sample pictures below). The very peculiar bokeh can sometimes create some special looking effects, but is mostly distracting from the subject.

Most mirror lenses are manual, and that's a shame, as focus is difficult with such a narrow depth of field. Most of my pictures were throwaways due to lack of focus. If you can find one with Auto Focus, such as the Sony, it might be a real advantage.

Aside from the focus issues, these lenses are very slow. Even is daylight, I was shooting with ISO settings up to 1600, resulting in high noise, not always correctable in a de-noise program (I use Dfine).

This lens has a solid metal build and smooth focus ring. It came with a nice lens hood, and one filter "skylight" filter in the rear mount. I understand it originally came with a set of additional ND filters.

It seems that some people had some good success with mirror lenses, but I was disappointed in mine. Likely caused by the photographer, or the lens itself. True tele-shots were very blurry and had low contrast and saturation. My best results were with close to medium distance. Actually not to bad to get birds in full frame if they are a few meters from you. The further the subject, the lesser the quality.

It is an easy way to carry around a high focal length, but I think I will stick to regular lenses as I believe that even with less focal length, I could get better results, even when cropped.

I actually liked the results of my cheap Samyang 500mm F8 much better. Just easier to use and sharper. But it seems some people were able to get good results.

RMC, or Rainbow Multi Coated, stands for a multiple of chemical coatings for lens surfaces with minimum light loss. The result is a dramatic improvement in both color fidelity and brightness and the elimination of flare and ghost images.

Lens Specification:

Focal Length: 500mm
Maximum Aperture: F8 (actual measurements is rumored to be more like F9.5)
Minimum Aperture: NA - Mirror Lens with Fixed Apperture
Image Format: 35mm
Lens Mount: FD
Optics: 7 elements in 2 groups
Blades: na (mirror)
Focussing: Manual
Minimum Focus: 150cm
Filter Size: 35.5mm (rear)
Weight: 485g
Length: 87mm
Production: late 1980's
Serial Number: 8136767

Samples: