8-24 ish mm zoom

[John]

10 minutes ago, LondonNeil said:

Or the Helios hyperflex? same 40⁰-60⁰ fov and 18mm eye relief.  Are these 2 budget options flawed, decent for the money or.....an svbony 3-8 like little known gem?  Well.... probably not the later or the forum would be awash will l with praise for them,  but you know what I mean. 

I owned a Hyperflex 7.2mm - 21.5mm zoom for quite a while. It's optical quality was pretty good but the AFoV was narrower than the spec says - more like 36 degrees to 53 degrees perhaps ? (my estimations). I used it with the Baader Q-Turret 2.25x barlow and the high power performance in it's barlowed 9.5mm - 3.2mm zoom range was surprisingly good. 

I feel that the Hyperion 8-24 zoom (Mk IV) is a bit better (certainly noticeably wider AFoV) and the SVbony 3-8mm quite a lot better but the zoom range on that latter one only overlaps the un-barlowed zoom by a small amount of course.

 

 

Edited March 11 by John

[Roy Challen]

I have had two Hyperflex 7-21mm zooms, and personally, I think they are excellent value for money. Yes, they're a bit narrow, but that doesn't bother me at all. The eye relief is good (I currently don't wear glasses), and they perform well even at f/5.9

[LondonNeil]

Seems I'm going to try the hyperflex,  the 8e version though,  I just grabbed the one Andrew had in the classifieds 

[Roy Challen]

15 hours ago, LondonNeil said:

Seems I'm going to try the hyperflex,  the 8e version though,  I just grabbed the one Andrew had in the classifieds 

Ought to be pretty good. I didn't know what the difference was between the 7E and the 8E, but the clue is in the name - 7E has seven elements in four groups, the 8E has eight in five groups.