Junior Member Registered: August, 2009 Location: Lexington, KY Posts: 30
1 user found this helpful
| | Review Date: September 28, 2011 | Recommended | Price: $123.00
| Rating: 9 |
| Pros: | Well made clever design, view angle | | Cons: | Flare and sharpness, need to stop down host lens | | Sharpness: 3
Aberrations: 10
Bokeh: 9
Handling: 9
Value: 9
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This is a very special lens, rare and highly collectible. Weird enough it is not too expensive. 
Despite the "hack" nature of the device, it is exceedingly well made. About the same size as a 200mm lens, it is larger than most fisheye converters, but not at all awkward. Unlike many fisheye attachments, this seems to work well with a very wide range of host lenses. It isn't even heavy enough to cause issues with stressing the lens filter mount -- works well on my tiny 35mm f/3.5 Takumar. Images are inherently free of CA, which certainly isn't true of fisheyes. Modern software allows simple conversion of images into various 360-degree viewing formats.
Here's an unconverted image with the area outside the image circle made black:
Problems:
1. Needs to be in its case when not in use -- the optically clear cylinder is very vulnerable, although it is well made.
2. The focus-on-the-mirror problem requires very careful selection of focus setting. This is best done by stopping-down the lens and tweaking focus to get as much as possible simultaneously sharp in a magnified live view. This is a losing battle. However, once set, you don't need to refocus for each scene.
3. The slightest dust on the mirror (or camera sensor) will show crisply in the images. This is partly a characteristic of this type of reflector, but also a direct consequence of using the host lens stopped down to f/16, f/22, etc.
4. Flare is horrific and virtually unavoidable. Flare is most often visible as curved bright patches which don't destroy the image content, but are definitely annoying to look at. Usually could be repaired in PP with careful editing.
5. The camera host lens will generally see the scene around the mirror directly through the glass tube -- so the circular image is surrounded by an undistorted but out-of-focus scene that might trick your meter.... Center metering isn't good either, because the center is the dark reflection of your host lens.
Bokeh? Everything is always in focus except for issues with the focal plane not lining-up with the aspheric mirror surface. There are no bokeh per se.
All that said, this is so cool! A number of companies have made modern versions of this, but they are much more expensive and, honestly, not as well done. Some others might avoid flaring as badly by having the mirror exposed (i.e., using a center strut to mount the mirror rather than a tube with a rear adjustment screw), but that causes more problems than the reduction in flare would be worth. How could one not recommend this?
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