About durability of plastic lenses...

Spoiler alert: this story has a happy ending.

I was recently on vacation and was using my Olympus 45mm f/1.8 lens a lot. One day I had a moment of clumsiness and the lens slipped my grip, thankfully with both the back and front caps attached. Anyway, it first bounced on a glass table and then fell right down the stone floor of the balcony. I was expecting it to shatter into pieces, but much to my big surprise, it didn't have any visible scratches whatsoever! I quickly attached it and took a few test photos to see if it suffered from any internal damage, but it performed just as flawlessly as before.

This puts things into perspective to me, since I've always been thinking that plastic lenses = cheap and low quality. I thought I'd share this in case others have the same assumption.

--
David Tenser
My equipment: http://djst.org/camera/ | My photos: http://flickr.com/photos/djst/