3 decades of telezoom

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SnowFella
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3 decades of telezoom

Post by SnowFella »

Having recently picked up 2 older telezooms to go along with my long kitlens I figured that for sh*t and giggles I'd set them up side by side for a straight out of the camera comparison. They are more or less 3 decades worth of Alpha mount zoom's, only more or less as 2 were released back in the 80's and the kitlens around 2007.

Here's the 3 lenses in question.
Image
Left to right: Sony DT 55-200/4-5.6 (released 2007), Minolta AF 100-300/4.5-5.6 (released 1988) and Minolta AF 70-210/4 (released 1985)
70-210 much longer than the rest but both the others extend when zooming, the oldtimer stays the same length through the whole range..it can also manage f4 through the whole range as opposed to the others.

Mounted to my oldish Sony A350 that sat on a tripod I metered out an exposure at f5.6, dialed in the resulting exposure into the manual mode in order to get identical settings for all 3 and shot a single frame at both 100mm and 200mm using all 3 lenses on the same focus point.

Here's the 2 shots from the Sony DT 55-200/4-5.6, straight out of the camera and just resized to 800px wide.
Image
Image

Minolta AF 100-300/4.5-5.6 results
Image
Image

And the oldest of the bunch, Minolta AF 70-210/4, backed it off a tad from the max 210 but still ended up a fraction closer than the previous 2.
Image
Image

Hard to really see a difference in these relatively small images so heres 2 better comparisons.
The "wide" angle of things, Sony on the left, Minolta 70-210 in the middle and Minolta 100-300 on the right.
Image

And even more telling, a close crop of the 200mm shots (70-210 frame scaled down to 98% to match)
Image
Animated .gif to make it more apparent but forgot to set it to run over and over again so you might have to reload it to get the effect.

Have to say I prefer the old 70-210 in both colour and sharpness, plus it's built like a tank (think I could hammer nails with it without ill effect). Just a shame it weighs more than the camera itself so it feels seriously nose heavy.

Going to attempt the same thing again later on but with something set in direct sunlight, this afternoons focal point was in the shade.
Charlescox
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3 decades of telezoom

Post by Charlescox »

i am so unbelievably sorry to gravedig this hard. Feel free to throw stones at me if you ever see me in public. ever.

In the sheet music for Diddles for Decades, what do the X noteheads mean?
DaveW
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Re: 3 decades of telezoom

Post by DaveW »

I don't know what is wrong with the Photobucket hosted images Snowfella, but none is sharp on my computer and all appear to be out of focus, therefore I checked images in other posts in this section and they were sharp, therefore it does not seem to be my computer? Did you try them on your computer screen beforehand and were they manual or autofocussed?

Only other thing I can think of is you were using the zooms closer than their minimum focus distance, something you often cannot detect on the camera focussing screen.

Anyway do a check since there is obviously something wrong regarding the posed pictures.
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SnowFella
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Re: 3 decades of telezoom

Post by SnowFella »

Crikey that was quite the thread resurrection! 6 years!
Long since moved on 2 of the lenses and the old A350 is now gathering dust as I've gone through 2 camera updates since. First 5 years with a Sony A77 and a tad over 2 months ago to a Sony A99ii.

As for the images, it's photobucket doing something strange to some of my old uploads, long since stopped using that site for images and nowadays use Flickr. Though that site is mainly displaying my birding related hobby, cactii has taken a backseat to birding over the last few years.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/153053144@N04/
DaveW
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Re: 3 decades of telezoom

Post by DaveW »

Hi welcome back SnowFella. My friend was a cactophile and then became a birder, but eventually saw the light and has returned to cacti again!

I thought there was something funny when they had the very prominent Photobucket logo over them. Maybe the site thought another site was trying to steal your images and defocussed them?
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Dixie_Amazon
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Re: 3 decades of telezoom

Post by Dixie_Amazon »

In 2017 Photobucket decided they weren't making enough money by hosting images. Especially since most of their users didn't actually pay anything. You are probably over the free storage limit.

"The Photobucket Free Tier is provided for users to get started with up to 250 images or a maximum total of 2.5GB and try all the features of our Beginner package including 25MB per month of image hosting bandwidth."
Dennise
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SnowFella
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Re: 3 decades of telezoom

Post by SnowFella »

Yep, most likely the "free" limit that's kicked in. Reason I left was their snap change to their terms & conditions.
Coming up to the same decision soon when it comes to Flickr, starting to get awfully close to having to go "Pro".
DaveW
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Re: 3 decades of telezoom

Post by DaveW »

One of the problems of linking to image hosting sites if you fall out with them rather than putting the image from your computer directly onto a forum.

You see quite a lot of dead links on older posts where the link to the hosting site no longer works therefore the post often no longer makes sense. I usually just post an image direct from my computer to a forum. Possibly the only advantage is some image posting sites will allow much larger images to be posted than the forum itself does.
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Steve Johnson
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Re: 3 decades of telezoom

Post by Steve Johnson »

Charlescox wrote: Wed Sep 11, 2019 1:05 pm i am so unbelievably sorry to gravedig this hard. Feel free to throw stones at me if you ever see me in public. ever.

In the sheet music for Diddles for Decades, what do the X noteheads mean?
Way, way OT, but...

The X noteheads indicate percussion instruments (snare drum, cymbals, etc.).
If you just want photos without all the blather, please visit my Flickr gallery.
My location: Los Angeles, CA (Zone 10b)
vitt13
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Re: 3 decades of telezoom

Post by vitt13 »

I have the possible solution, you (or Moderator) have to try to edit all broken IMG with changing protocol in all img links from http to https. So, just add one letter s
like this
SnowFella wrote: Sun May 19, 2013 7:55 am Image
Edit: I apologize. It was not a permanent solution, it was using a cached image in my browser...
I used url without third level domain like this

Code: Select all

photobucket.com/albums/jj576/Snowfella/comp2_zps25dff96e.gif
and it redirect me on

Code: Select all

https://photobucket.com/gallery/user/Snowfella/media/bWVkaWFJZDoxNDYwOTgxMjc

and so it leads to show me temporally original not blurred image.
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