Vivitar lenses? Fisheye in particular.

[Sinister_kid]

How are the quality of Vivitar lenses? I'm looking at the fisheye in general from here:

Amazon.com: Vivtar 7mm f/3.5 Series 1 Manual Focus Fisheye Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras: Camera & Photo

But I don't want to buy a lens that is poor quality and have to buy a new one in a few months.

 

[JohnnyL]

I personally haven't tried it but just thought I'll name a few other lenses you can look at which are similar incase you haven't heard of them.

Peleng has the 8mm fisheye and Rokinon has something similar. They're all about the same price range. I think Peleng is more common though. You see more pictures of them on Flickr. I think you'll get vig with these lenses? I don't know about that.

Hope I was able to offer you some help if any at all.

 

[Dwig]

How are the quality of Vivitar lenses? ...

Its a totally unanswerable question. Vivitar didn't make any lenses. They either bought existing lens designs or commissioned the construction of designs that they bought elsewhere. The quality of the products sold under the Vivitar brand varies from lens to lens from mediocre to excellent. It is impossible to say anything that applies to all of their products.

 

[blash]

Older Vivitar stuff from back during the film days is generally great equipment. Then the rights to the Vivitar name were sold and the majority of their newer equipment is disgusting as they decided to rape the reputation.

 

[Antithesis]

I have a mid-80's 28-85 zoom from vivitar and it's pretty dang sharp. But, apparently that can't be applied to any of their other lenses.

I've seen used Tokina 10-17mm fisheyes sell for around that price on ebay. Just keep an eye out. It'll likely be a far better lens.

 

[usayit]

Thread made me wonder about what happened to the Vivitar brand so I looked it up on Wikipedia. OMG how sad. Sold for only $24 million to a company that recently went bankrupt and is now under a no-name electronics company ownership who is responsible for many of those inexpensive accessories so many retailers push in their "packages".

I used to have a vivitar series 1 built during a time when "series 1" actually meant something. It was a well built quality lens. I think I still have a couple primes in M42 mount laying around too.