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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