Today I used for the first time a mirror lens. I always wanted to try out this kind of lens, specially because of the rings in the bokeh or background blur. The one I bought is a Rubinar 500mm f5.6, it was around a hundred dollars and that’s a good price compared to the prices at E-bay. Its Russian made, probably in the 1990s, its heavy and larger than I 
expected. The quality looks OK the only thing I noticed is that the numbers looked to be engraved by hand, not important, gives it kind of a charm.
The quality of the pictures is not that great if sharpness is important to you. If you focus further away the sharpness is not that bad but the closer you get to the minimum distance of two meters the softer the pictures get. I used a tripod for most of the pictures so I could use the focus assist on the X-t1 whereby you see a zoomed in center of the frame. If you try to do this handheld with this 500mm on a cropped sensor (750mm) you have to much shake. On the tripod the pictures stays nice and stable and you can clearly see that the pictures is not sharp though the focusing ring is nice and heavy and in principal good enough to get a good focus.
For now I am not unsatisfied, for me sharpness is not a necessity for creating an interesting image.
It was a nice and sunny day, I used relatively high ISO values so to get a decent shutter
time. The aperture is fixed at f5.6 as is normal with a mirror lens. I used Lightroom to see if I could some extra sharpens out of the RAW files. The colors and contrast of the pictures was not bad but I pumped them up in some of the pictures because that can sometimes help with the (perceived) sharpness.
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