Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/01/11
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]The thread that produced so many references to Questar has prompted me to comment on my experience with this catadioptic telescope. Questar, made in New Hope, PA, originally did such a fantastic job in advertising this product that I drove up to the plant and office to see what this was all about. This was in the 70s. Questar was positioning itself as the all-time premier small telescope, sharper than sharp, able to define butterflyl wings at 50 paces, stuff like that. It received some good reviews in the photo mags, which will promote anything that is also advertised. I bought one, with the motor to let it track stars for very long exposures. Big mistake. First, to be fair, it was sharp....a 1400mm lens I recall, but not exceptional. It certainly did not beat any good brand-name regular lens. It was sharper than my Nikon 500mm f/5 catadioptic, my Nikon 500mm f/8, and my Canon 500 f/8 cat. And it was SLOW. I tested it alone and then tested it at National Geographic and the center was a full 1 1/2 stops slower than Quester advertised. And it had edge falloff, which we thought it should not have due to the cat design. But the killer was that there was going to be a fairly long solar eclipse centered over Virginia Beach, VA. Geographic wanted this covered for an article it was doing on eclipses and I got the assignment. In addition to shooting the eclipse in a long sequence, I also shot it with normal, medium, and very long lenses. To get details or the corona I ordered from Questar their solar filter, which would allow you to look and shoot directly at the sun. I called and explained what I was doing and who it was for and the large filter arrived a day or so before the eclipse. Geographic rented a Winnabago for me to camp on the beach. I set up a fence around it so I could set up 6 tripods and cameras without people tripping over them, and I discovered that Virginia Beach street lights were on automatic light-sensitive timers and they would all come on during the eclipse. I contacted the mayor and had them all disabled. This was a big-deal assignment. Everything went perfectly with all cameras, lenses, and other gear.... except for one. All the pictures with the Questar looked as if they had been double-exposed. There was an extra dimmer image of the sun about 1/8 inch below the real image. I had a second image messing up every frame. All the film was unsable with the Questar. Next day I called and raised hell.... expecting to hear that they must have shipped a broken unit, or something like that. Instead, the Questar rep in PA said that the solar filter (which cost a couple hundred dollars) was an amateur product, never intended for professional use, and was not perfectly parallel!! I sent the entire rig back for a full refund and have never seen nor touched another Questar. If they are not in bankruptcy, they should be. Fred Ward