Bower 800mm f/8 Manual Focus Telephoto Lens for Nikon

I purchased the Bower 800mm f/8 Reflex Mirror Lens looking for an inexpensive 'recording' telescope for remote inspection and industrial photography. For the price this lens is hard to beat. It isn't the same as a [$]refractor telephoto- for one thing it's around [$]… it's also a lot shorter and lighter. It IS a cheap lens, completely manual, fixed aperture, lots of plastic, screw mount with adapters, somewhat 'soft' without any really absolute sharp focus and f/8 so it's dark in the viewfinder.When I started in photography most of my lenses had some of these attributes so I'm fairly good at 'follow' focus and have made some nice, very usable images handheld at 50-100 yards with this lens. From a tripod with a D3 back at high ISO settings and 'live-view' focus magnification I've produced usable images from typical room lighting and had better results outdoors. This is what revealed the limits of focus quality however- at very high focus magnification the limits of resolving power of this lens is evident.So it's not a lens for fine art or serious wildlife photography but within the limits of price and materials incorporated in its construction this lens is well engineered. For its size and weight it's a good addition for anyone wanting extreme telephoto capability on a budget.

I used it with a Nikon D3 for some very very simple nature photography and not only the manual focus is somewhat cumbersome but the actual tmount has a little play which greatly interrupts focusing even further. It is well constructed itself but found more usefull for creating out of focus art shots than anything that would normally consider an 800mm for.