Agena 1.25" Wide Angle (WA) Eyepiece - 12mm

I ordered this direct from the seller. It's your basic, cheap eyepiece, one that tries to compete with budget Pössls on price, while offering a wider field. A couple of negatives: AgenaAstro advertises blackened lens edges. I disassembled the eyepiece. It has nothing of the kind. Blackened lens edges are supposed to help improve contrast, especially if light traveling through the eyepiece strikes the edge of the optical elements. Looking at terrestrial scenes revealed rich color saturation, and very nice contrast. While I had the eyepiece apart, I blackened the lens edges. Looking at terrestrial scenes revealed rich color saturation and nice contrast. I could tell no difference.This is a good eyepiece. The design is basically the old König 2 (see the comments for a link to a page with the design). It was never designed as a wide angle eyepiece. It was supposed to offer a 50-55° apparent field of view, with good contrast, an orthoscopic field, and good eye relief. Pushing this eyepiece to 60° reduces the eye relief and exposes some edge of field issues, mostly in the form of lateral color. Jupiter, eg. takes on a red on one side, blue on the other fringe starting about 70% of the way toward the edge of field.I compared the eyepiece, with a Barsta ED 12mm (sometimes called a Starguider ED or Paradigm) and a Takahashi 12.5mm orthoscopic. An eyepiece is orthoscopic if straight lines don't bend toward the edge of the field. The WA 12mm is more orthoscopic than the narrower angle Takahashi that bears the "orthoscopic" label.Bumping magnification on my f7.5 refractor to 150x with a 3x Barlow showed an eyepiece with very little scatter. Noticeably less than the Barsta ED, and almost as low as the far more expensive Takahashi. The Barsta ED also showed faint internal reflections of Jupiter. These were absent in the WA and Takahashi. In short, this cheap eyepiece is a very good planetary performer by anyone's standards.