Hello,

I just bought an Nikon EL-Nikkor 5.6/150mm enlarger lens from Ebay.
Seller said in the description that the glass is very clean. When the lens arrived, the front and rear glassses
were spread all over with small scratches.

The lens was shipped without caps packed in a little plastic bag wrapped with a small piece of bubble plastic and one page of a newspaper alltogether put into a
'USPS Flat Rate Mailing Envelope'
Now the seller wants to assure me that this scratches were no problem,
here is what he has written to me yesterday:

"Hello I'm happy to hear the lens finally arrived, and sad to hear you are not happy
with it. I really feel that this lens was very nice and very clean, especially considering
how old it is.The glass is very clean with nearly no dust at all. The dust is what causes the most problems with enlarging lenses.

Please try to clean the marks off of the glass with a lens cleaning cloth. They look like scratches,but they are mostly cleaning marks.
Also this lens has a high quality protective coating which may have some light cleaning marks in it but will have no problems with making reproductions.
Please test the lens and if you are still interested to ship it back do so.

I would really like you to keep this lens and work something out with you since the shipping time was so long and I really do believe this lens will impress you if you use it."


This sounds odd to me.
Now what are your opinions?
Is that true what the gentleman writes or just blah blah?
What makes a lens unusable?

I wanted to use this lens to enlarge 4x5 negatives with my Omega D5-XL
enlarger. Why should I use a defective lens after I made all that effort
to get my 4x5 negatives?
I cleaned the glasses very carefully with Zeiss lens cleaning set, of course the scratches were not magically disapeared, why should they?


BTW, what does it all have to do with the long shipping time
from US to Germany ( 5 and a half weeks after payment )?
And what has it to do with the age of the lens - "considering how old is it" ?
I have an old 65mm Linhof Super Angulon and there is no scratch on the glass!

Yes I'm happy

Andi