Is my ancient zoom actually better than my modern one?
QMy first SLR was a 35mm Pentax in the early ’90s; I bought a second-hand Sirius 80-200mm f/3.9 lens for it as I was off to Kenya on safari. I had no idea what I was doing and regrettably the lens has sat unused ever since. I recently bought a cheap adapter for Pentax to Canon EOS and compared a couple of poor pictures with my Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS STM (bought second-hand). When I zoom in on photos taken with the old manual lens they seem significantly crisper and to have less noise than those of the modern lens with AF and IS. Is that wishful thinking? I want to do some moon photography and I reckon a crisper manual 200mm lens set to infinity is probably a better option than a 250mm with more noise? Jeltz (AP forum)
AIt’s not unheard of for an old and relatively inexpensive zoom lens to perform exceptionally well, but it’s rare. I’m not familiar with your old Sirius but it sounds like it has a fixed maximum aperture so it could be brighter at the long end of the zoom range and that could boil down to less image noise. For moon photography you can use a low ISO and still get a fast shutter speed because the moon is actually very bright. Manual focus and even manual exposure, with lots of experimentation, is recommended. I also suggest you use a tripod and let the camera settle before taking a shot. You can do this by using the self-timer or a remote shutter release. Ian Burley