Extreme price variation in wide-angle lenses
 

I currently use a Sony HDR-FX1 and am looking for a good quality wide-angle lens adapter, somewhere between .5x and .7x. In doing some online searches, I've found $30-$60 adapters and $300-$600, and a couple fisheye adapters costing thousands of dollars. Why is there such a discrepancy? What is the specific difference in terms of image quality and distortion between the $30 adapters and the $300 ones?

Do you really need to ask why a $600 lens is better than a $30 lens? All has to do with the optical quality. Cheap lenses will not be sharp, will have a lot of chromatic abberation, will exhibit severe barrel distortion, will not be zoom through, will not have properly coated elements.....

From my experience, expect pretty severe barrel distortion on any adaptor wider than .7x. I have the Century .6x and it is pretty extreme even though it wasn't cheap.

Boyd,

Thanks for the info. Common sense told me that the more expensive adapters were better, but I was looking for specifics, since it's a big investment. I think this is reasonable.

Does anybody have suggestions for specific wide-angle adapters on the hdr-fx1?