Surprising Lens Options!!

[Tyson Persall]

Anyway to attach an XL2 stock 20x lens to the JVC cam? with adaptors of some sort?

[Chris Hurd]

No such thing exists. I seriously doubt if it ever will.

[David C Wright]

Sorry if I missed this bit of information somewhere, but will there be an option to use lens designed for a 2/3" B4 mount?

[Chris Hurd]

Hmm, for a 2/3rd-inch lens? Haven't heard of one but there is a 1/2" adapter.

[Tyson Persall]

Well, I was just thinking of all the XL1 series and XL2 owners out there who own a fortune of investments in lens for there cameras... Seems they would be the target audence for this new camera- I mean, it pretty much might as well be the XL3 if you painted part of it red.

JVC is the first prosumer other than Canon to come out with an interchangable lens cam... (that I know of)

Unless, - Are Canon XL1/2 lenses only made to work with the XL series cams?

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Originally Posted by Tyson Persall

Unless, - Are Canon XL1/2 lenses only made to work with the XL series cams?

Yes, I think they are, unfortunately.

[Kevin Dooley]

Well, I'm sure you'd lose any camera control of the lens, but I'm pretty sure someone could machine an adapter of some sort so that you could actually mount the lenses on the JVC cam... it's just a matter or whether or not that's worth it since you lose all your focus, zoom, and iris control (not that the JVC cam would control those anyway from the looks of the current lens offerings...)

[David C Wright]

What I am hoping is to be able to use a number of unusual lens that I bought for a Sony DSR500. These include an Innovision HD probe lens. I would likely also want to use a telephoto or macro lens with a Nikon mount. Sounds like that will be available from people like Optex in the UK

[Dan Vance]

Originally Posted by Tyson Persall

Anyway to attach an XL2 stock 20x lens to the JVC cam? with adaptors of some sort?

Unfortunately, the flange focal distance on the XL lens is a couple mm shorter than the 1/3" bayonet lenses. This means that even if you could place the lens flange against the camera flange (which is dimensionally incompatible), the XL lens is still too far away from the camera. So to adapt the XL to the bayonet, you would have to completely remove or modify the actual mount on the XL lens, which means disassembling the lens, which is kind of scary. And such a mod would mean it would no longer fit XL cameras.

[Chris Hurd]

Thanks for the clear explanation there, Dan. For anyone who is already heavily invested in Canon XL lenses and wants to move to the JVC HD100, the best available option is to simply sell off those lenses and use that money to buy the proper 1/3" or 1/2" lenses and 1/2" adapter for the HD100.

[Louis Quin]

OK, reverse the combination of camera to lens:

Would adapting the new 1/3 JVC HD 13X lens to a XL2 have any benefit? Then you've got 2 cameras it would work on.............Hypotheticaly of course!
Would this be better than a Mini 35 setup or cheaper?

[Barry Green]

It would be nothing like a mini35 -- the JVC HD lens would exhibit identical depth of field as the existing Canon lenses do (millimeter for millimeter). And the JVC lens is more expensive than an entire mini35 setup.

As to whether there'd be any benefit to adapting the $12,000 JVC lens to work on the Canon -- perhaps; if the lens is a properly-engineered high-def lens it should be capable of resolving significantly more detail than any of the SD lenses the Canon uses. That may or may not show in the final picture, depending on how sharp the existing Canon lenses are.

[Louis Quin]

I must have had a "senior moment" when asking about the Mini 35! I guess putting a 1/3 camera to a 1/3 lens (with adaptor) should have been obvious when considering DOF. Just my newbie mistake.

As in the past thanks for the great input!

One would hope that at 10X the price of a Canon 3X wide lens that this would give a better image, if it was feasable to mount of course.

[Barry Green]

Keeping with Steve's memo title of "surprising lens options", here's another one. According to the Australian version of the HD100 brochure, they'll be introducing a c-mount lens adapter too.

C-mount lenses were a fairly universal screwmount standard in the earlier days of 16mm cameras. There are also a number of c-mount video lenses available, as some security cameras etc. use c-mount.

I doubt many (if any) c-mount lenses will be up to the task of delivering quality high-def video, but the prospect of using a tiny Switar 10mm on the HD100 is, for some reason, oddly intriguing...

Also, and this is the cool part, c-mount adapters exist for just about every type of still camera lens. You can get Nikon, Canon, Pentax Screwmount, basically any kind of lens can be adapted to c-mount, so with the c-mount adapter you'll be able to use many still-camera lenses too. I've got a 500mm Zeiss Fernobjektiv that might make for some seriously telephoto shots (that'd be the equivalent of about a 3,600 mm still-camera lens!)

[Kevin Dooley]

Just out of curiousity (and my own ignorance I suppose), why wouldn't a 16mm film lens be able to resolve enough detail for an HD camera, specifically this HDV cam?

Like you Barry, the thought of using other lenses is quite intriguing... especially if a set of C-Mount 16mm primes could be found at a reasonable price...

For instance, here's a super wide angle lens on eBay:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...gory=4691&rd=1
Of course the benefits of that particular wide angle are probably lost since the CCD's are about half the size of the original intended imaging surface...