Rant: Spent $180 on a lens alignment tool that barely worked

I bought one of those cheap optical alignment collimators off eBay to calibrate a Yashica-Mat I was fixing. Paid $180 for it and the crosshairs were off by a mile - it was basically useless for anything serious. After fighting with it for a week I ended up building my own simple pinhole jig for under $20 that works way better. Has anyone else found a decent budget collimator that actually holds calibration?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_cameron26d ago

Built a cardboard collimator for my Mamiya C330 once. Just used a pin in a film cap and a flashlight. Calibrated it against a brick wall at 50 feet and it was dead nuts on. Those eBay ones are total junk, man.

daniel_lane3026d ago

Small correction - a collimator needs something at the focal plane, not just a hole. A pinhole in a film cap alone won't work right for focusing. You need a ground glass or some frosted surface back there to see the crosshair against the brick wall. Otherwise you're just guessing where the focal plane actually sits. Still, respect for the DIY spirit. Better than those flimsy aluminum eBay ones that come misaligned out of the box.

terry_jones25d ago

50 feet with a cardboard box and a pin and you're calling it "dead nuts on"? Come on man, that's just you convincing yourself it works. I've seen guys spend way more time and effort on alignment than that and still end up with soft corners. A pinhole jig for under 20 bucks is fine for rough checking but for actual calibration work you need something that can repeat the same measurement more than once. Those eBay collimators are garbage but let's not pretend a piece of cardboard is the solution either. Maybe it works for your specific camera but I wouldn't trust it for anything with a focal plane that's more than a couple millimeters off.