I want to share my experiences with the “Lens2scope” device, and offer a word of warning potentially sparing you some disappointment – and some money.
What is it?
The device is not a new invention – the idea to put an eyepiece on a photographic lens is old and has been done a couple of times before by different vendors, e.g. Nikon and Minolta.
Basically it justs consists of an eyepiece, a magnification lens, and a prism – the prism turns the upright-down image from a photographic lens back into the correct orientation, and the eyepiece lets you look through the lens just like through a telescope.
The Lens2scope attached to my Sigma 100-300 f/4
Who needs it?
This device is obviously not for photography – it is for watching the action, not making pictures. A situation I find myself in rather more often than not is that I have reached a certain interesting place, but the action is going on really too far to take any photos that are for more than just IDing the birds. Instead of sitting there frustrated, I could switch the camera for the Lens2scope and watch the action instead.
I bought mine in May before my summer vacation, and had planned to use it during several birding trips in Britanny, Western France. My 100-300 mm f/4 Sigma lens would be turned into a 10x-30x magnification spotting scope, or even a 14x-42x using the 1.4x teleconverter.
Use and observations
Sweet and short: The device works as advertised. I found the picture to be clear and surprisingly bright. Lens errors were of no concern, certainly there was a slight chromatic aberration, but much less than with my standard 8×36 Nikon Monarch binoculars. The magnification could clearly be improved by using the 1.4x teleconverter, while adding the 2x converter didn’t seem to improve the situation – I wouldn’t recommend using it.
Focusing is actually quite sensitive, but still very easy with the excellent manual focusing ring of the 100-300. This will be much harder with a lens which cannot be precisely focused manually.
The device is sturdily built albeit a little plasticky, but the advantage is its light weight of just 185 g. More on the quality of the metal bayonet below…
Example – what to expect
As the device is not for photography, I cannot show any pictures of what you can see if you look through the scope. But I can give you an example of where I used it successfully.
Close to Cancale, in Eastern Brittany, Western France, there is a small bird colony of gulls, cormorants, some shags, and common shelduck on the Île des Landes. The island itself as a bird protection area is of course off-limits for humans, but the seabird colony can be watched from the nearby Pointe de Grouin.
The observation distance is actually not that bad, looking at Google maps it’s between 300-400 meters. But photographing the birds? Forget it, too far. With the 8x binoculars? Nice, but nothing really interesting to be seen. Just good enough to identify the birds.
Setting up the scope looking at the Île des Landes
With a dedicated spotting scope – or in this case the Sigma 100-300 mm with 1.4x tele converter and the Lens2scope? Wow! Suddenly you are able to see the gull’s chicks in their nests, and to clearly distinguish the European Shags there from their pretty similar looking relatives, the Cormorants, also present on the island. I enjoyed watching two Shags feed their chick which was hiding behind one of the boulders on top of the island – all you could see from the chick was the beak hungrily opening when one of the parents came back with more fish, and sometimes the near bald head if things weren’t moving quickly enough to its liking .
With my 8x binoculars: Which chick? Which boulder?
The Caveat
So far, so good. Mission accomplished – the device itself has no electrical or moving parts, and the optics are ok. What could go wrong? Well, the bayonet mechanics used to connect the Lens2scope to the lens were so sharp and tight that the use of it damaged my precious Sigma. During the vacation. With no repair service or replacement lens available. Argh.
What had happened was that obviously in one of the many times I exchanged the Lens2scope for the camera, mounting it with the bayonet I was too fast, or too slow, or didn’t hit the right connection spot (red dot to red dot) – and I turned the Lens2scope in the bayonet damaging the first of the electrical lens contacts.
The first pin of the telelens damaged by the Lens2scope
The camera would no longer speak to the lens giving me the infamous fEE error – I knew, the lens was toast. I suspect the Sigma lens to be more susceptible for that damage than an original Nikkor, as the Nikon electrical mounts are little metal balls, while the Sigma has a plastic tongue with an electrical contact, which additionally feels slightly spring loaded, intended to provide active closed contact.
So I warn anybody thinking about using the Lens2scope with Sigma lenses – I think this is a dangerous combination. I certainly will never attach it to my 1000€ lens again. The other brands I cannot judge, but after this experience I would recommend at least high caution when mounting and dismounting the adapter – and honestly, out in the field things sometimes have to happen fast, and I want my equipment to be robst and not have to think about fragile connections.
My vendor offered to take mine back, but of course refused to take over the bill for the Sigma repair. The German distributor I asked relayed my question to the manufacturer in Taiwan, but the disappointing answer roughly translates as “be more careful”.
I “survived” my vacation and many photo opportunities by taping the contacts preventing any electrical error to creep up, and instructed the camera I had attached a manual 300 mm lens. This gave me back the aperture priority mode, at least. No autofocus – I re-learned manual focus over a 3 week period, but that is another story…
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Tags: Birding Location, lenses, nature reserve, Travel
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Oops, that hurt!
Hope that repair bill wasn’t too painful…
Cheers,
Constantin
Update: I got my Sigma 100-300 f/4 back from repair yesterday – with an invoice of about 70€ incl. VAT and postage. It could have been worse… but still very annoying.
Certainly I will take it out this weekend, and test if the repair was fully successful.
I think the manufacturer should look at this issue anyway (and I did have guests from Taiwan on this page
) – it seems to be the combination of Sigma lenses for Nikon, and I know this is a very popular setup. Canon users have reported no problems so far, and as I indicated above I can imagine a Nikon lens will also be more robust than the Sigma/Nikon variant.
Hi,
Thanks for the review.
I have a few questions.
How is the image,is it sharp.(also sharp on the edges?)
Have (can) you compare(d) it to a real spotting scoper?
Greetz,
Mix
Hi Mix,
thanks for the flowers!
The image quality itself I think is more determined by the lens than by the lens2scope – on a relatively high quality lens like the Sigma 100-300 f/4 I found the image to be remarkably bright, and sharp. I even added the 1.4X TC. Remember you are only using the very central part of the lens, so I wouldn’t expect any large quality fall off at the edge of the (circular) image, but honestly I haven’t looked there that closely as I usually center my subject.
From my experience, the combination I had could easily compete with low-cost scopes (e.g. a Nikon ED50) – and for me even more important was the idea that I wouldn’t have to carry the scope in addition to everything else. I have no experience with high quality scopes, and can’t really imagine it will fair well against those. More important is probably the perceived effect that the depth of field was pretty narrow (as the lens I used it on was f/4 and wide open), narrower than on the spotting scopes I have used. Thus, also focusing was more sensible and therefore slower (until you had found the spot).
Hope that helps!
Christof
Hi,
Thanks again for answering my questions.
ps. where did you buy it?
Hi Mix,
as the vendor reacted actually cool by taking the lens2scope back even after I had used it already for 4 weeks, I can recommend him: orniwelt.de
Take care!
Christof
Thank U for the nice review.
I have the Nikon 70-200 and I am very tempted by lens2scope.
Do U think this could work with cheap 500mm mirror lenses?
Cheers
Andreas
Hi Andreas,
!
thanks for the praise
With a 70-200 the Lens2scope would certainly be worth a try (you can use teleconverters!), with a 500 mirror – I am unsure. The depth of field is really shallow and you have to manually set it – with a fidgety lens I think this will be very frustrating. It was ok with my Sigma, which has a high quality manual focus like your 70-200. But it was really only ok. With an even longer lens (and 500 is a lot!), you would require an equally better manual focus, and I doubt the cheap mirror lenses have that, even if I have never owned one myself.
Just beware the mechanical quality, as said. I didn’t dare to buy a new one. Maybe if they release a revised version I would look at the Lens2scope again.
Cheers!
Christof
Hi Christof,
Thank you for the answer.
About the contacts I saw that the Nikon contacts are slightly from the Sigma ones, so I hope there wont be a problem with it.
I am trying to find where to buy it as this is not a very popular accessory.
Regards,
Andreas
Hi Christof,
Thanks for your useful report. I was thinking to take my old Tamron 500m f/8 back on use, with this device: I abandoned my Olympus system some years ago, after the ease of use of a Canon Ixus… this could be a good chance to use it back again.
The problem is that I should be able to retrieve an Adaptall-2 mount for Nikon (or Canon, the Lens2scope doesn’t support the OM mount), then purchase the adapter online (there is no distribution in Italy, where I live).
Can you tell me how much is a Lens2scope, more or less?
Thanks,
Ivan (Milan)
Hi Ivan,
it’s about 170€ in Germany, see the price search engine here for vendors.
I would be interested to hear from you if it works with a mirror lens – this would be worth looking at for me as well! My fear is that the depth of view is so shallow that you need a really good manual focus in the lens for it to make any sense at that large magnification (remember the lens2scope does mm/10 magnification, so you would get a 50x fixed magnification scope – that is a lot).
Cheers,
Christof
Hello Christof,
thanks for your prompt answer! Actually, I pose the same question on price to both the Lens2scope company (directly in Taiwan) and a little Italian distributor (that I found by chance in the net): buying the adapter directly from the facory would cost me 150 € (including shipping), whereas the Italian distributor would ask 210 €! Then I should also add the cost and search of a Canon or Nikon Adaptall-2 ring.
So, also considering that for this price I could easily find a discrete binocular, I have some doubts in keeping on with this solution: as you correctly warn, I also fear that the overall magnification and depth of field of the resulting telescope would be critical, especially due to the mirror-based construction.
Do you perhaps know any other similar adaptors, possibly also with a smaller magnification factor? I tried to do some search in the net, but it’s not easy, also because this is of course not a common device. I also saw somewhere an homemade solution, using an eyepiece accomodated to the lens with a soft plastic cap…
Ciao,
Ivan
Hi Ivan,
I think currently there are only third party “lens scope converters”. Nikon once made one (see it on Ken Rockwell’s page here: http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/lsc.htm), but I have read that it is pretty expensive on the used market. Interestingly, he claims on his page: “I found the 500mm f/8 C reflex lens to be very well suited to this converter because the reflex lens is crappy for photography, but has great central definition.”
I know Minolta once made one (compatible now for Sony DSLRs), Leica did one for the R-system, and I am sure other vendors as well. The 10x magnification seems to be the common spec, the Nikon did the same 10x as the Lens2Scope.
Regarding self-built adapters – I stumbled across many pages in the net from guys doing astrophotography – they usually have tons of additional equipment and creativity, so if you start googling astro scopes you mind find something (I don’t have any bookmarks at hand, unfortunately, but a quick look also turned up several warnings about self-built being not so easy after all
).
A large section of astro articles can be found here: http://www.baader-planetarium.de/sektion/s_start.htm (They do have an English price list) and here http://www.alpineastro.com/.
I also found a discussion on a German forum where the major conclusion why all of these devices have been discontinued was that the field of view necessarily is too small on a 35mm camera, because there is no room for a largeer prism required to put the image back upright.
I’m thinking of buying a real scope and an adapter for my camera now
Cheers,
Christof
Hi Christof,
thanks again for all the references you provided! As soon as I have some spare time I think I’ll check them all.
Can you tell me the exact formula to calculate the overall system magnification, given the lens focal lenght and the eyepiece magnification? E.g. in the 500mm case I remember by heart it should be 500/50 (focal lenght of the “normal” lens) giving a 10x factor. But, where to insert the eyepiece magnification?
But… as a matter of fact yesterday, googling in search of “adapters” and the like, I crossed in this page: http://foto.bonavoglia.eu/g1-om.html (soory for the Italian, but it should be possible to get a reasonable online translation) where the possibility to re-use the old Zuiko OM stuff (mine!) is highlighted. So, I think that I’ll put again in stand-by the telescope adaptation, to go in search of the Lumix G2 (that’s easy, simply matter to spend about 420 €…) and the OM-Lumix adaptation ring (Amazon has one, for around 25$).
The odd thing is that I discovered that the author is… the brother of a colleague! World is quite little!
Thanks again,
Ivan
maybe what is needed is a slight, homemade modification of the lens2scope’s bayonet ? Is it too sharp ? Where ? Could you enclose a picture of the bayonet and show us WHAT part of it caused damage ? I think this lens2scope is a very good idea with a problem one coud solve in minutes with file
Hi Gen,
thanks for the comment!
Unfortunately I do longer have a lens2scope and didn’t make a photo of the bayonet – but if you look at your camera body’s mount, you can see three protruding metal shapes. This is the same with the lens2scope.
Filing might be possible, though if it is not the sharpness at the edge (might be easy) but the thickness of the protruding metal, it might get tricky – shaving off from the inside of a curved metal plate would be beyond my skills
I had the same idea and this is why we contacted the manufacturer in Taiwan, but without any useful reply (see above).
Cheers,
Christof
Hi, I was wondering if you have tried the lens2scope with a small extension tube between lens and adapter?
If it works I would have thought you could only damage the tube.
Hi Roy – that’s a nice idea actually! Too bad I didn’t try, but without knowing what exactly the extension tube would do to the focusing capability of the lens2scope, it still sounds it could be a fix.
However, I do prefer products that work out-of-the-box, and given the price tag of the lens2scope I think it shouldn’t be necessary to jump through the hoop like that
Cheers,
Christof