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So the camera issues came all at one time today.

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hcoley said:
hcoley wrote:

I can't understand why it does not look like fungus to you when it clearly is a growth on the lens. Zoom in on the photos and you will clearly see that it is. The fungus is branching out from the outer edge towards the center. It has the usual pattern of fungal growth.......
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Not in my experience. Fungus growth in lenses looks like very thin branching threads that extends in an irregular way. Google for "lens fungus growth" an see lots of examples.

In your lens, what I can see is a very regular pattern of radially oriented segments of "something" around the edge of the lens. Sadly I don't have pictures of my damaged lenses but they looked quite similar and I'm sure they had no fungus.

Anyway, If you received the lens this way, its absolutely wright to ask for a refund.
 
MightyMike said:
MightyMike wrote:
MightyMike said:
awaldram wrote:

Do not offer to cover postage for return of the item if the seller wants it back then he pays.
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Paypals official policy is that the buyer pays the return shipping on a dispute.
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That may be true but in every case I've had where the seller thinks they can pull a fast one , ebay has covered the return cost and billed the seller for the privilege.

If a seller commit fraud I have no intention of being out of pocket for any part of their shenanigans.

As a seller I ensure I am completely honest with my customers and expect other to do the same.

 
hcoley said:
hcoley wrote:

There are no camera stores in my area any longer that trade in good used Pentax gear. Heck no one sells the new stuff either. We have one store that still has a few used Pentax bodies and lenses but I swear all that they have looks like the worst stuff I have ever seen. The place that used to have all the good stuff went out of business about 10 years ago. I miss them!
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I have seen at least a half dozen lenses from eBay with fungus. Most sellers are reasonable once your provide pictures obviously showing their lens and the fungus. However, being an occasional seller myself I can understand an honest seller (who didn't inspect their lens well) being suspicious that you are yet another of the "essentially good" scumbags who populate eBay. Ever since eBay removed the seller-to-buyer feedback the bottom-dwellers have had a free-for-all claiming all kinds of problems but offering the accept the item at a reduced price. It is the most common scam and so when you actually receive an item with an issue you automatically appear to be a scammer to anyone who knows eBay.

The fact is most people are simply terrible at inspecting lenses. I do a detailed inspection with a LED flashlight on receiving any lens and the same when selling. You WILL see various specs of dust around the inside of ANY lens when doing this and they are of little consequence (though they can show up in OOF bokeh highlights). So taking normal dust into account the flashlight is great for finding fungus, separations, etc. Don't shine it in your eyes though. :-)

I actually got a macro lens from KEH that had 3 strange spots on an inner element. These were strange and actually looked like some kind of evaporation residue not at all like the various examples of fungus I have seen. KEH, as expected, was very good about it and offered a full refund or discounted price. So, even the pros can miss stuff.

About the most amusing thing I have seen in a lens I didn't see for a week or two after purchase. I bought a MINT Tamron 23A from a guy and it was indeed clean as a whistle - even the original case was like new. I think it was basically unused. There was just about no dust even BUT when looking down the barrel with a flashlight at just the right angle I saw a small fragment of a fingerprint on the very edge of an element about 3 or 4 in from the front. Obviously this was done at the factory and of course has no effect on the lens.
 
It's the glue between a cemented lens pair separating. I've seen it before and it usually starts in a bubble on one edge of a lens and as the drying continues it will work it's way around. The giveaway is those fine little air channels that form as the elements start to pull away from each other.

Every example of fungus I have seen, whether looking like veins or a distribution of tiny snowflakes, exhibits a randomness in it's distribution. This does not. It is the result of air channels forming in the glue under the influence of the evenly distributed force of the elements pulling apart from the outside in.

Separation cannot be fixed and is considerably worse that some fungus as far as ruining image quality. The lens is a junker unfortunately.

--
Any government that has the power to correct any injustice and level any inequality also has the power to do ANYTHING it wants.
 
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Carlos U said:
Carlos U wrote:
Carlos U said:
hcoley wrote:

I can't understand why it does not look like fungus to you when it clearly is a growth on the lens. Zoom in on the photos and you will clearly see that it is. The fungus is branching out from the outer edge towards the center. It has the usual pattern of fungal growth.......
Click to expand...
Not in my experience. Fungus growth in lenses looks like very thin branching threads that extends in an irregular way. Google for "lens fungus growth" an see lots of examples.

In your lens, what I can see is a very regular pattern of radially oriented segments of "something" around the edge of the lens. Sadly I don't have pictures of my damaged lenses but they looked quite similar and I'm sure they had no fungus.

Anyway, If you received the lens this way, its absolutely wright to ask for a refund.
Click to expand...
 
I ran into a similar situation back in 2005 and also on eBay. I came out as top dog in an auction for a SMC-A 35-105 f3.5 lens. I receive the lens and the area of the lens where a filter is threaded on or a lens cap is attached was hopelessly dented. I emailed the seller and he said the lens was fine when he shipped it and either I or the USPS (the shipping carton was fine) inflicted the damage but out of goodness of his rotten heart he would refund $10 (back then this lens commanded a pretty decent price in the used market). My feedback was civil but less than a glowing response to the sellers ethics. He in turn body slammed me, kicked my dog, insulted my mother and called me a complete jerk. I complained to eBay but to no avail.

Optically the lens was fine and back in 2005 I was 90%+ shooting film so I sent the lens down to a former Pentax tech in TN (believe his name is Eric Henderson) and for $35 he repaired the lens. Great! This is about the only zoom that I use. However, this incident made me very skeptical about buying off of eBay. Incidentally the 35-105 was advertised as in "Mint" condition. I still would on occassions buy off of eBay but watched the sellers ratings. A SMC-A 70-210 f4.0 which would not go into the macro mode and an LX which was advertised in good condition (it was not) told me eBay is not the place to buy from. At least these last two sellers refunded my money.

I had real decent luck buying primes from B&H and Adorama and wanted a FA31mm f1.8. Ended up looking at eBay and the prices were atrocious. Found one on PF but did not buy based on my eBay experience. Finally, in January (this year) one appeared on Adorama's site and I bought it immeditaely. Did not save that much over new at B&H but places like B&H and Adorama stand behind what they sell. I have dealt with B&H since the 80's and Adorama over last 3 years.
 
Just saw Mike's note that the lens doesn't have cemented pairs. So much for that explanation but I swear I have never seen fungus look so perfectly distributed.

--
Any government that has the power to correct any injustice and level any inequality also has the power to do ANYTHING it wants.
 
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SRT201 said:
SRT201 wrote:

Just saw Mike's note that the lens doesn't have cemented pairs. So much for that explanation but I swear I have never seen fungus look so perfectly distributed.

--
Click to expand...
Well, the K200mm f4 has 5 elements in 5 groups, and the A200mm f4 has 6 elements in 6 groups. But the M200mm f4 has 6 elements in 5 groups implying a bonding of sort between two elements?

This lens is not an "A" lens, and it's not a "K" lens either.

--
-Mike
 
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In a braindead moment a couple of years ago, eBay decided that sellers were intimidating buyers with threats of negative feedback, so they removed the sellers option to give negative feedback. As a seller, the only feedback you can give is positive or none at all.

I agree that many dissatisfied buyers were afraid to speak up for fear of negative feedback, but I don't think eBay "fixed" it the right way. Sellers still deserve a voice. A buyer can run roughshod over you, fail to pay for an item, ask for a partial refund, etc. and you can't even warn other sellers. I'm probably in the minority here, but as an honest ebay seller, I can tell you that we get taken advantage of by bad ebayers too.

That looks more like separation than fungus to me, but I can't tell for sure. Either way, it's bad. File an "item not as described" case with Paypal. They should find in your favor. This seems a pretty straight-forward case to me.
 
If it actually is the M 200mm with the optical formula you mention then I am sticking to lens separation. I have seen separation exactly like that and you can find examples on the web of the same.

I have never seen fungus look so ordered and I have no reason to believe it would. Fungus starts at a point where the initial spore takes hold and grows outward in a colony. For fungus to create that look a continuous ring of fungus would have to simultaneously form on the periphery of the lens.

On the other hand the forces created by cement contracting and pulling away from two lenses could reasonably create a pattern just like that.
 
If hcoley lens was the M version, then it has two cemented elements at the back of the lens, just where the picture was taken. I also could be wrong, but I insist it looks more like lens cement degradation than fungus.

SMCPENTAX200mmf4KandM_zps51ce0aae.jpg


https://picasaweb.google.com/HDColey2/DPReview?authkey=Gv1sRgCLHh5LGlpr3EpgE#5862826781259685026



--
Saludos,
Carlos.
 
Carlos U said:
Carlos U wrote:

If hcoley lens was the M version, then it has two cemented elements at the back of the lens, just where the picture was taken. I also could be wrong, but I insist it looks more like lens cement degradation than fungus.

SMCPENTAX200mmf4KandM_zps51ce0aae.jpg


https://picasaweb.google.com/HDColey2/DPReview?authkey=Gv1sRgCLHh5LGlpr3EpgE#5862826781259685026

--
Saludos,
Carlos.
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The diagram does suggest the possibility of a delaminated pair, but it just didn't look like that to me. If it is delamination it probably is a worse situation than fungus on resolution and light transmission. Seller said he had seen that pattern and thought it was part of the lens design. Not sure why he would have thought that since it takes up so much of the lens area and it is not a symmetrical shape. Being it is so old, delamination would not be out of the question. I have seen delaminated lenses in medical instruments and they never looked like that. They were always random bubbles and not uniform at all. I have also seen fungus on element pairs in light absorption measurement instruments that looked a lot like this lens, so that's why I thought it was fungus. I have also seen it on camera lenses, but it was not quite as uniform as this.



--
'I got a Pentax camera. I love to take a photograph, so mama don't take my Photoshop away.'
 
GeorgeD200 said:
GeorgeD200 wrote:

In a braindead moment a couple of years ago, eBay decided that sellers were intimidating buyers with threats of negative feedback, so they removed the sellers option to give negative feedback. As a seller, the only feedback you can give is positive or none at all.

I agree that many dissatisfied buyers were afraid to speak up for fear of negative feedback, but I don't think eBay "fixed" it the right way. Sellers still deserve a voice. A buyer can run roughshod over you, fail to pay for an item, ask for a partial refund, etc. and you can't even warn other sellers. I'm probably in the minority here, but as an honest ebay seller, I can tell you that we get taken advantage of by bad ebayers too.

That looks more like separation than fungus to me, but I can't tell for sure. Either way, it's bad. File an "item not as described" case with Paypal. They should find in your favor. This seems a pretty straight-forward case to me.
Click to expand...
An eBay resolution case is in process. Apparently they are holding his PayPal funds until he gets the lens back from me which was shipped back UPS last night. eBay also has the UPS tracking number from me as of this morning.
 
Jim Beverlin said:
Jim Beverlin wrote:

I ran into a similar situation back in 2005 and also on eBay. I came out as top dog in an auction for a SMC-A 35-105 f3.5 lens. I receive the lens and the area of the lens where a filter is threaded on or a lens cap is attached was hopelessly dented. I emailed the seller and he said the lens was fine when he shipped it and either I or the USPS (the shipping carton was fine) inflicted the damage but out of goodness of his rotten heart he would refund $10 (back then this lens commanded a pretty decent price in the used market). My feedback was civil but less than a glowing response to the sellers ethics. He in turn body slammed me, kicked my dog, insulted my mother and called me a complete jerk. I complained to eBay but to no avail.

Optically the lens was fine and back in 2005 I was 90%+ shooting film so I sent the lens down to a former Pentax tech in TN (believe his name is Eric Henderson) and for $35 he repaired the lens. Great! This is about the only zoom that I use. However, this incident made me very skeptical about buying off of eBay. Incidentally the 35-105 was advertised as in "Mint" condition. I still would on occassions buy off of eBay but watched the sellers ratings. A SMC-A 70-210 f4.0 which would not go into the macro mode and an LX which was advertised in good condition (it was not) told me eBay is not the place to buy from. At least these last two sellers refunded my money.

I had real decent luck buying primes from B&H and Adorama and wanted a FA31mm f1.8. Ended up looking at eBay and the prices were atrocious. Found one on PF but did not buy based on my eBay experience. Finally, in January (this year) one appeared on Adorama's site and I bought it immeditaely. Did not save that much over new at B&H but places like B&H and Adorama stand behind what they sell. I have dealt with B&H since the 80's and Adorama over last 3 years.
Click to expand...
 
Perhaps the way the coating was distributed before it was vapor distributed might be the cause of the uniformity
 
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