Originally posted by Wasp I now have one of these in my collection.
From a quick bit of research, it goes onto a projector lens to project wide screen movies. I have tried it on the front of my Samsung 20-50mm but it doesn't work.
It seems like I will need a projection lens with some sort of camera adapter to take pictures with it. If that is possible...
Cool find!
It's possible that you have more than just the "anamorphic adaptor" part of the projector lens assembly.
One test to try with this lens(or any old lens) is to:
1) stand some yards/meters from a brightly lit window
2) point the lens at the window
3) try holding a thin piece of paper at various distances behind the lens (as it it were a bit of film or sensor)
If you can get a focused image of the window on the paper, you've probably got the whole projector lens.
You can also use this method to estimate the
1) register distance (it's the roughly distance of the lens from the paper),
2) lens image circle (walk toward the window, refocus on the outdoors, and measure the size of the image circle)
3) the lens focal length: FL = (Distance_to_Window)*(Width_of_Window_Image)/(Width_of_Actual_Window)
(Note that an anamorphic lens has TWO focal lengths: vertical and horizontal)