Can I add a front lens to an action camera to narrow its ultra-wide field of view?
Asked 10/22/2015
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2 answers
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I have a fixed-lens action camera with about a 175° f/2.8 lens and a 4:3 sensor. I’d like to reduce the very wide field of view and get more natural-looking footage by putting an additional lens or lens assembly in front of the built-in lens, instead of buying a second camera.
Is it practical to design or choose an add-on front lens for this? What factors would matter, such as focal length, diameter, spacing, and image quality?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
1
If you use a single lens, or even just a few lenses, the image quality will be very bad. The actioncam has a very small sensor and thus very small pixels. The resulting demand on the lens to delivery resolution is very high. Simple lenses do not have adequate resolution for this and will give you a blurry image.
You would be much better off using a different camera. If you were so inclined, it would be more effective to spend the money you would spend on this project to purchase a low cost camera to record the video with.
Originally by user40937. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user40937
10y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
In practice, this is usually not a good solution. An action camera’s built-in lens and very small sensor are designed as a matched system. Because the sensor pixels are tiny, any added front lens has to deliver very high resolution across the frame; simple single-lens or small multi-lens add-ons usually won’t, so the result is often soft or blurry image quality.
There have been DIY adapters made for cameras like GoPros, but they are more of an experiment than a simple optics project. Getting the focal length, spacing, and coverage right is difficult, and even then image quality may be disappointing.
So while it is possible in a DIY sense, it is generally impractical if your goal is good-looking footage. The community advice is that you’ll usually get better results, and often better value, by using a different camera for normal field-of-view video—such as a phone or another inexpensive camera—rather than trying to engineer a front-lens attachment for the action cam.
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