Arsat MC 3.5/45 lens

Arsat MC 3.5/45mm - There doesn't seem to be much material on the web about this lens or the older Mir-26b single coated lens either.

It appears that quality varies from lens to lens.  I think the lens I got was made on a Friday.
When I put it on the camera, the image looked awful on the focusing screen.  Only about 20% of the image was in focus.  From the centre out the rest was blurred.  The second problem was that when the lens focusing ring hit infinity distant objects were still out of focus.
I decided to try and fix the lens myself.  I removed the front element and worked down until I found a group that could be reversed.
Upon reversing this group the image improved greatly.  Next I dismantled the focusing assembly and re-assembled it on a different thread.
It is now perfect at infinity.  I am yet to assess the performance of this lens.

Here is a sketch that I have done to show how the lenses are arranged.

You can see the layout of the 8 elements in 7 groups. I guessing that this lens is a Mir-26b with multicoating.

I have also done a sketch of the Mir-38b, click [HERE] to go to my Mir-38b page.

This page was updated Thursday 11th March 2004.