Old Tokina 400/5.6 FD - Any experience?

Hi - Has anyone used this lens? How well did it work? - I see

the "photodo" rating is poor at 1.9. I can get one fairly cheaply (>

$100) and I would use it for nature shots. I use a Sigma Zoom (80-

300) that I am not particularly thrilled with. Also the extra 100mm

may be usefull. I have searched the archives but they all refer to

the newer ATX AF lenses wich seem to be quite good.

Hi Lee, a 400 f/5.6 lens in good-good condition for a hunyd bucks? yea. $200? maybe not. It's going to be way better than a good zoom or a 200mm plus 2X, your talking 400 prime. I had one for a while before getting something better, I paid about the same price. Don't expect to get any corner sharpness out of it at any aperture but it should be viewable, center sharpness should be good. Just try to keep things like grass, flowers out of the corners. It's going to be better the farther the subject is away from the camera. Photodo rates the whole lens and corner sharpness is problaly why it got a rating of 1.9, you can always crop that part of the pic. Should be multicoated. Expect focusing to be difficult when the light gets lower than a ball park at noon, just said that for effect. But I'd think it would be easier to focus that a 500 f/8 mirror. adding a 25 or 50mm ext. tube and doing some cool close ups? picture quaility and DofF will not be better than your sigma zoom. Trust me this lens is no where near the ATX in performance but fun and it will get you into working with 400mm for cheap, just think if you had to spend $800 and then found out 400mm is not your cup of tea? its not all that big but 400mm is a long ass lens so hand holding is not a good idea. my 2 cents.

Hi Gregory. Thanks for your comments. Not as bad as anticipated. I will see how it goes - I guess a 2x on this is not going to work terribly well :-)

I tried using a seven element teleconverter with this lens and found it to be unsat. and found no real use for an 800mm f/11. I tried to do some double exposures, the moon in the top of the pic and the subject in the lower half. Well the moon looked like crap, the subject was crystal clear, and the moon always appeared pasted on. The results without the teleconverter were okay though, okay- meaning I'll except it because I know what it is. I found this lens was mostly being used for candids and portraits. But my new 400 is great for close-up nature, and have found it can be limitless, what a huge difference 2/3rd's stop and $700 made, even though it was over priced.