Eyeglass repair kit for scratches?

[kb244]

I have a small original canon Demi, that has a bunch of tiny scratches on the front. If you shine a light thru it you'll basically see a big mesh of tiny scratches, in the pictures it gives a soft diffused look in a circle in the middle of the pictures.

One method I heard of repairing was using jeweler's polish which is a very fine abbrassive and polishing the front of the lens, but you had to be careful.

The other one that I'm curious about was those eyeglass repair kits that you can remove scratches from glasses. Supposibly they can make glasses that look like they were rubed down with steel wool look new again. I'm wondering if I got one of those repair kids cheap if I could get rid of the diffusion in the center of the little lens on my Canon Demi. Or at least know if its possible to remove the material once applied (in case the tests dont fair well). My assumption is that it may work, but that it may affect a camera lens, more than it does eyeglases as some may say eye glasses don't need to be as critical about minor surface curvature.

Also here are some pictures from the last time I went out shooting with the demi if you are curious.

Its either that or leave the demi at home, til I need some soft diffused shots. But I just kinda liked the idea of having a little half frame snapshooter around provided I could get the shots to appear normal, if not least sharp enough for a 4x6.

 

[Jim Jones]

Don't try to eliminate the scratches. Photographic lenses must be ground or molded to much greater precision than eyeglasses. It would be cheaper to replace the camera with a good one than to try to correct the problem.

 

[Dave Parker]

I tried the eyeglass repair kit on a pair of my old glasses, it did work for about 6 weeks and then started to change color and cast a yellow cast when you looked through them, it reminds me of the stuff they came out with several years ago for automobile paint, the stuff you could just wipe on and let dry, that stuff was horrible after about 2 months and was impossible to get off, most of this stuff is some kind of polymer liquid that does deteriorate after a period of time, so I think putting it on a camera lens would probably after a short period of time would exihibit the same problems and would probably in the long run, make the diffusion worse and not better.

Dave

 

[kb244]

Anyway to minimize the effect of the light hitting the scratches making them show up as diffusion, like if you used a filter or some sort? or is it somehting I'd have to live with?

 

[Christopher Colley]

leave it how it is, at least it looks unique... I mean, do we really need every photo to look super tack sharp and like everything else?

I prefer photos that look like this to ones that look like every other photo made by a lens that comes off the factory line. You got something unique that produces photos that look a certain specific way, go with it.