Dust in a lens

thecornishone

thecornishone

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Tony
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Evening all.

How much notice do you all take when a lens is advertised as having some " insignificant dust within the lens, which doesn't affect picture quality". Am I worrying g too much and is it true?

Thanks
Tony
 
Pretty much all 2nd hand lenses will say it has some dust in it. Pretty much all 2nd hand lenses will have some dust in it. The less there is, obviously the better, but in my experience, a little dust doesn't do any harm. Worst case is that you may need to spend a few moments removing it in PP. The lower price of a 2nd hand lens is often worth the little extra work that may result.
 
None Tony, it really doesn't make a difference in my short experience.
Even a few small scratches on a lens won't show up on an image.
 
Ive shot with some old legacy lenses on my Fuji thats had plenty of visible dust but I've never seen it in the images.
 
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The most it will do is lose a bit of contrast.

Depending on which element the dust is on you probably won't be able to see it in sharp focus.
 
A lens cannot ever focus on itself so dust in the lens cannot appear in the image. As the Cornish stone says, it will reduce contrast but nothing more.
 
There's got to be a serious amount of dust to deteriorate the IQ and cause lack of contrast etc.
 
It depends on what you are photographing. I had a very dusty front element on a Nikon 18-200mm which would never show up in the daytime. But doing long exposures at night with bright light sources within the frame showed the dust as oof blobs. It was not sensor dust as this was clean and a quick search on how to remove the front element got it cleaned and sorted.
 
You'd be surprised how much crud you can have in a lens before it gets unusable - I have an old Pentacon 29mm which is full of dust, the coating is stuffed, scratches galore. You'd never know when using it 99% of the time.
 
MartinCornwall said:
It depends on what you are photographing. I had a very dusty front element on a Nikon 18-200mm which would never show up in the daytime. But doing long exposures at night with bright light sources within the frame showed the dust as oof blobs. It was not sensor dust as this was clean and a quick search on how to remove the front element got it cleaned and sorted.
Click to expand...


Yeah, contre jour shots may it show it up more as Martin says.
 
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