My personal macro and tele lens comparison

As promised, I took my Meike rings on the 75-300 zoom.

I took the usual picture of the wristwatch. But I noticed a strong red color shift in the dark tones. I noticed bad contrast in other pictures, but red was new as was the red cloth. Here is the picture, identical exposure settings, same Lightroom settings:

100% crops, @85mm/f11 Meike left, 124mm/f11 Marumi right.

I took the rings off and looked at the rings, they are black but very reflective. The contrast problems seemed familiar now: I had a microscope adapter for my OM-D which was essentially a black tube with mFT mount. But the black was reflective and gave very bad light effect in the center of every picture.

Same is with the Meike rings. You get a strong cast from the inner ring surface.

To give you an impression haw bad the rings shine on the sensor, I took a picture of the lens mount: normal light with simply a white sheet of paper before the lens. Note, the pictures do not exaggerate the reflection: The white paper you see through the lens is not overexposed and no other light source was in front of the lens, only paper.

Strong reflection inside the Meike rings, essentially no reflection on the lens mount without rings.

I think the current findings are very, very discouraging for the extension rings. Maybe other rings have better structured surface. Maybe I have a bad replica of the Meike rings? Anyhow, my rings are near to unusable, have to say it ...

Maybe someone has better rings and can post a photo how they are build?

Chris