We often suspected the stop rating was a lie. I was pretty convinced it only hit that level because of atrocious light leaks. When I describe it as a telescope. I mean it was literally constructed like a cheap telescope. It had very few elements in it. And I think most of those were plastic. It was essentially a very cheap. Quite wide gauge. Lens of much shorter focal length. Clipped onto a cheap metal tube that acted as a sort of pinhole camera sort of thing to simulate an actual 1500mm lens. And that focal length rating was probably inaccurate too. Its possible that i’m mis-remembering them as being f4. But I do remember it was shockingly low especially compared to the other long lenses on hand.
Cheap off brand product from Asia. Probably manufactured as a gimmick some time in the 80’s and remained available because noone would buy them (except my Camera chain). They were terrible. But lots of fun. Fine art photography students liked to buy the damaged ones for funsies!
And remember that actually a camera lens is both a Leica and probably has fancy features like more than one f-stop and a focus ring. The things in question were insanely basic and unstable.
ETA: For context it might help to think about other products. A 7ish" iPad starts at $399. I bought a 7" Android tablet for $25. Or 1/16th the cost. The major difference is that the $25 Android tablet is crappy.
So really I’d like to stress just how crappy those weird off brand super telephotos were. They were absolutely the crappiest crap in the store. Sold as new old stock for a max of $600. But almost always selling at a substantial discount as a clearance item. I almost bought one at $120, but when we tested the display model we got better photos out of the $49.99 kids telescope kit and an adapter to hook it up to a camera. They were almost always to be found in the scratch and dent discount bin. Or at least part of them. I once sold a student a damaged back tube, for which all the other bits were missing including whatever elements should have been in that tube. For 20 bucks. I think he was gonna cut the section of the tube with the tripod plate out and make some sort of shock mount out of it.
