Mignon Auxiliary 8x30 monocular tele

[belgiumreporter]

Popular in the 60ties were these monucular tele adapters wich could be screwed on the front of your (standard) lens. It was an easy and relatively cheap way to get a 400mm tele. Back then i never used them and as far as i know i never saw results of these monocular combinations.

But now it so happens i got one( mignon 8x30) brand new old stock, for free, time to test it out :-) . The standard takumar 50mm 1:1.8 becomes a 400mm f8 in combination with the 8x30 monocular. the combination is very light weighted, however the focussing screen becomes very dim and focussing becomes very difficult. even with the pentaxes shake reduction set on full it's virtually inpossible to get sharp images handheld. to get the full potential a tri pod is needed. Results were acceptable at best, but diffraction and lack of contrast didn't help on overall image quality, closing down the apperture didn't help much. Anyway i didn't expected anything else and now i know for sure. The Mignon will now be put in the collection between other oddities. These days there are better ways and cheaper 400mm lenses to get those tele shots.

Here's a few examples, the entire frame and cut out 100% enlargements.

[julio1fer]

I have the Zeiss Contarex version. Shot it a few times, not really outstanding results but it worked. Once somebody thought I was shooting with a gun and wanted to report me to the police.

[belgiumreporter]

I often wondered how these expensive Nikon and Swarofski monuculars with adapter perform. For the price of say a Swarofski monocular one could easely buy a decent tele lens, so is there any point in having an adapted monocular or is it more a case that if you already have one, it can be used as a not so good telephoto?

[julio1fer]

Monoculars are relatively short and light compared to real telephoto lenses. And image quality may be better than mirror types. Their problem is small aperture, something like f/14 fixed, IIRC.