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Lensbaby 12mm Fisheye Scout Mount Review RSS Feed

Lensbaby 12mm Fisheye Scout Mount

Sharpness 
 8.0
Aberrations 
 5.0
Bokeh 
 4.0
Handling 
 6.0
Value 
 9.0
Reviews Views Date of last review
1 5,578 Fri December 23, 2016
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Recommended By Average Price Average User Rating
100% of reviewers $43.00 8.00
Lensbaby 12mm Fisheye Scout Mount
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Description:
The Scout is a simple focusing mount for Lensbaby Optic Swap System lenses that seems to have shipped with a 12mm Fisheye lens as standard. It's no longer listed new, but seems to be readily available second hand. Like other Optic Swap System lenses, the fisheye uses aperture stop discs rather than an iris diaphragm, but the disks are a special set intended only for this lens, marked with FE plus the aperture. Without a disk the lens is F4, the disks cover the range F5.6 to F22. Minimum focal distance is given as 0.5"



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Pentaxian

Registered: December, 2016
Location: London
Posts: 1,079
Review Date: December 23, 2016 Recommended | Price: $43.00 | Rating: 8 

 
Pros: Small, light, and a nice effect
Cons: Manual, aperture change is slow
Sharpness: 8    Aberrations: 5    Bokeh: 4    Handling: 6    Value: 9    Camera Used: Nikon D50   

This one of the lesser-known lens/mount combination from the Lensbaby stable, now discontinued, but a relatively cheap way to play with fisheye photography. The lenses are often on sale second-hand around £50 in the UK, and while they're fairly limited, they do enough to tell you if you want to spend serious money on a better lens. They work reasonably well within their limitations, of which the most annoying is probably the aperture ring system. Changing rings is a little fiddly, and it's way too easy to drop rings or the lens element while doing it. But since depth of field is ridiculously good there isn't much point changing rings anyway, I found that my initial results with the f8 ring were a little overexposed, so I now tend to leave the f11 ring in all the time and vary the speed instead. There's obvious chromatic aberration around the edges of the image, but Lensbaby would probably tell you that's a feature, not a problem. Bokeh is negligible since the depth of field usually means that nearly everything is in focus.

This was designed to give a circular image on 35mm film; on a digital camera with APS-C sensor the corners are cut off but most of the frame is filled. This is less dramatic but possibly more useful.

I took it to Hyde Park in London with my Nikon D50 and a standard 18-55 VR zoom for comparison. At the time the camera was in need of a clean and there are some marks visible in the sky.

Zoom at 18mm, 320th second f9



Lensbaby 12mm, 500th f8


I should probably point out that the 12mm lens is not recommended for use with any of the variable-angle Lensbaby mounts such as the Composer, since it doesn't have the "sweet spot" offered by other lenses of the series. I haven't tried this, possibly someone else could comment?
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