Fish Eye 7.5mm or 15mm on LetusXL?
 

Has anyone tried these extreme wide angle F 2.8 lenses on the LetusXL?

Since the 1.9x zoom factor I am curious to see the F.O.V. results. I'd very much like to emulate a "Creature" P.O.V. for a feature.

I did search Ebay and these are hot commodities - going for $400+ a pop!

Please post your thoughts.

Thanks!

-C

This clip was shot with a Peleng f3.5 8mm on a home-made AGUS35 which has near to the same field of view as the LETUS35 FLIP FOR CANON XL and LETUS35 FLIP for JVC HD100.

On the LETUS35A the aquired image off the groundglass can be larger and this lens might vignette unless you can zoom in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cx-GTXQLF6A

What you get from the fisheye lens will depend on how big a patch of the groundglass area the image will cover. The Peleng f3.5 8mm will cover the 24mm x 18mm 35mm motion picture frame but is a round image on a 36mm x 24mm 35mm still-image camera frame.

There is apparently a very similar lens from Nikon but I don't know if it is current productiion.

There is a 16mm f2.8 fisheye lens, the Zenitar which seems to have found a bit of favour with skydivers. It covers the full 36mm x 24mm still-image camera frame but I found it lacked resolution, contrast and resistence to flare compared to the Peleng lens.

Because the LETUS35 and my own device aquire the centre portion of the available image from the Zenitar, there is less apparent barrel distortion.

I imagine this would be the same for a similar Nikon equivalent fisheye which I would expect to have superior flare resistence and contrast.

On the LETUS35 FLIP models, the 8mm f3.5 Peleng may be right on the performance borderline relating to fixed pattern artifacts.

On the AGUS35 which also produces artifacts with a Nikon f4 12mm - 24mm, the Peleng at f8 does not, so optically, something funny seems to be going on with superwides, so you might similarly strike it lucky on the LETUS35.

The Peleng lens gives you typical fisheye lens barrel distortion. The 12mm - 24mm Nikon zoom, which is a rectilinear lens, gives corner stretch and a weird perspective which might be more what you want for a creature POV. Its f4 aperture will likely kill it for LETUS35 use.