Purchasing a lens shade-Canon WD58?
 

Anybody know where to purchase a CANON lens shade for the Canon WD58?

I've got a Cinetactics MB80 shade. Nice french flag and filter holder too. Works reasonably well. Not quite a bargain like the Petrol LCD hood, but such is life.

http://cinetactics.com/

Of course with a little modification the Petrol hood could be just about made to work.

Lou,
Indeed, there is now a Canon lens hood designed specifically for the WD58 wide-angle adapter. I just bought one for a WD58 that I purchased 3 years ago.

It should be easy to find at B&H, Zotz, or other dealers.

I too just bought the Canon hood for the WD-58 from one of the retailers mentioned. $35 or so.

Thanks Guys! Just ordered mine from B&H-35 bucks.

Is the only advantage to having the hood that it blocks out more sunlight? Or is there some other thing I am missing here? Thanks.

Scott, the lens hood is the cheapest, lightest, best accessory that you can buy for your camcorder. The point of a hood is to stop non-image forming light from affecting the chips, and from diluting your image.

Here's a simple test I show my students. Set up your camcorder on a tripod, with no lens hood in place, looking at any old scene. Have the output fed to a TV for all to see. Now get a little movie light and hold it up to the lens, but at 90 degrees to the lens' centre line, so that you won't see the lamp on the image.

The light from the lamp (and of course it could be the sun, or street lights, whatever) - will cause lots of flare, and you'll see the degredation on the screen.

Now - keeping everything as it was, put your hand between the lamp and the lens. In other words, pretend your hand is the lens hood. Immediately the picture contrast improves, you don't see the dust on the filter and all non-image forming light has been blocked.

tom.

The wide angle lens adapter seems to have a special ability to pick up glare and sun flare. A hood helps a lot.

Correct Rick. A lot of that has to do with the shortened focal length and therefore the increased depth of field. This deeper DOF means that tiny imperfections on the front element of the wide-angle converter (dust, finger prints etc) will show up on film, and the more you can keep non image forming light away from the front element, the better. A hood's the answer, and flags are an even better answer.

tom.

The reason I needed the lens shade is due to the exceptional amount of abberations caused by external lighting. At times, the flaring was so bad that it was tantamount to an inside of a coke bottle.

These wide angle attachments are fine, but they all tend to magnify and pick up lighting which has an effect on both the chips and depth of field. Of course nothing beats the real thing-a true attached wide angle lens as found on pro cameras.