Photographers, which is better:

A Minolta manual focus 500-1000mm whoop-arse lens for $350, or a tele-converter (making my 300mm an effective 600mm) for $80?

With the tele-converter, I will have to use a tripod. Are there any other downsides to using a converter, like loss of quality or distortion?

(I don't care for autofocus, where a proper lens has an advantage. I always prefer to manually focus...)

Thx!

it will require alot more light (and I do mean alot)without giving anywhere near the quality of reproduction.A good shop will let you tryout both.

I did buy the tele-converter and will take some snaps tomorrow. If the results are too dark, I'll get the 500-1000 lens. $350 is somewhat of an 'ouch', but worth it by the sounds of things...

I am using the converter only for outdoor daylight photography though...

2000 mm uuugh-uuugh POWER.

You are going to have to keep your aperture a bit higher when you use it. When I first used one, it was a little funky but I got used to it. If I had the money, I'd buy the Minolta too...

heck, i'd buy anything if it attached to my camera :P

Of course, I'm using ISO100...

At quasi-600mm, the difference with lighting is quite noticeable (the shutter needing to be open at 1/125 second). However, if it's bright out tomorrow, I anticipate no problems...

But I'm thinking I might as well buy the 500-1000 lens anyway, especially for nighttime stuff. But those things are bloody HUGE!

Whether or not the 2x module stays is how good the prints come out... :-) Nice wildlife near where I work, fortunately...

My Canon AE-1 goes 3-22, I think!

Good luck with the lenses :)

A 2x teleconverter loses two stops. That's a pile.

You're going to have to use your tripod with either the 1000mm lens or the teleconverter.

Unless it is a very high quality lens, you can expect two sorts of aberration; Coma near the edge of the field and chromatic aberration mostly near the edge of field.

Take a few night snaps of a distant row of streetlights and then blow up the ones nearest the edge of the frame. If they look a lot like the ones at the center of the frame, you have a good tele-converter. If not, determine where in the frame the quality becomes unacceptable and frame your shots accordingly. Also, if it is a 2X teleconverter, you need to adjust the F-stop. What you are doing is doubling the effective focal length by two, so an F6 lens becomes an F12 lens.

Let us know how it goes.

said it was a very good tele-converter, though they stressed a native lens would still be better (lighting, autofocus, et al...)

That makes sense why F6 would then become F12 (and why it won't go below F11, heh...)

I'll definitely bring in some snaps, if the lighting's good enough tomorrow. There's some wildlife and little baby canadian geese awaiting my attention... :D (they're cute when little...)

So if the camera is stuck at f11, the lens is at 5.5 and the 2x tele-converter kicks in as well.

This'll make life easier, in a way, when photographing waterfalls. Usually lots of neutral density filters are required... Now I can do great galloping close-ups of... oh crap, I can only think of Minnehaha falls, and that place is a boring dump... :cry: