What are Vivitar lenses like?

[r2160]

Hi all

A friend was asking me what I thought of Vivitar lenses today and to be honest, while I have heard of them, I dont know anything about them.

Does anybody have any experience with them. He is talking of buying a fairly large lens, a 400mm I think and I am pretty sure it was a f8 lens.

What do you all think?

Glenn

[phillipb]

I bought a camera off Ebay once and it came with a Vivitar 28-300 AF lens. Not long after the lens started playing up. I couldn't find anyone in Sydney that would fix it. They all said that parts are too hard to get since they don't have an agent in Australia anymore.
Ended up trying to fix it myself and stuffed it up completely. Sold it for parts on Ebay for around $30

[Matt. K]

They are not good lenses in my opinion. Cheap.

[atencati]

I would liken Viviar to Quantary. Kind of a red heded step child. Now, I do have an EXCELLENT Vivitar lens for my pentax (film) cameras, i would say your odds of getting decent glass are 1 in 20. The nice thing is, they are cheap enough on E-Bay you can afford to play around with them and then sell them if you don't care for it. Might be a good way to test out some strange focal lengths before big spending....

Andy

[sirhc55]

Andy- Matt

This might be of interest:

http://www.cameraquest.com/VivLensManuf.htm

You will find some quite famous names in the list including Hoya, Tokina, Schneider, Olympus etc.

Cheers

Chris

[atencati]

Great link SIR!!!!! I knew Vivitar was basically a marketing firm but never knew where the glass came from. I inherited mine from my mother and the serial is 37820980283.


Truns out its a tokina lens from 1978, 20th week to be precise!!! cool. It always did take good pics, now it's just a decoration in my office.

That would also explain why about 1 in 20 lenses turns out good. I wonder how many of those companies still exist??

Andy

[Matt. K]

sirhc55
Thanks for that link. You are a fount of obscure, but extremely interesting information. How on earth did you dig that up?
Still have to state that personally I have never used a Vivitar lens that I thought was excellent...but I have only used a small numberMaybe others have had more luck.

[sirhc55]

sirhc55
Thanks for that link. You are a fount of obscure, but extremely interesting information. How on earth did you dig that up?
Still have to state that personally I have never used a Vivitar lens that I thought was excellent...but I have only used a small numberMaybe others have had more luck.

Matt - I am just a very old and obscure person who sits at a computer.

I must admit to having a Vivitar way back when that was pretty good. But, these days it’s either Nikon or Sigma tho I would love to try a Leica summicron or similar on the D70.

Chris

[Matt. K]

sirhc55
I think you'd find there's very little between the Nikkor 50mm at f/8 and a Leica 50mm at f/8.