Is there a way to shorten a lens’s effective focal length, like the opposite of a teleconverter?

Asked 12/8/2017

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I’m familiar with teleconverters, which increase effective focal length and narrow the field of view. Is there an optical accessory that does the opposite and reduces effective focal length?

I’m especially wondering whether this could be used as a cheaper substitute for an ultra-wide lens—for example, using a 16-35mm lens instead of buying something like an 11-24mm. I understand there may be image-quality tradeoffs and I’m not concerned about light loss.

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

8y ago

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It's called a focal reducer or speed booster, metabones makes many, however they come with caveats.

A teleconverter makes the image circle of a lens wider, so it can work on the same sensor/film size as the lens you attach it to was originally intended for. You can make the image circle smaller but it won't work anymore on the same kind of sensor/film the lens you use it with was originally designed for. So you can only use it with smaller sensor, e.g. full frame lenses on crop bodies.

However, it works, it makes the lens (when attached to that smaller crop sensor) effectively wider and faster, but it will only make it as wide as it used to be in the first place on the full frame sensor. However, it will be faster than it used to be on the full frame sensor.

Btw, a focal reducer is nothing but a teleconverter mounted in reverse. Just like a good teleconverter is expensive, you can expect a focal reducer to have the same (expensive) price.

Edit after your edit:

In the general case, you can't do what you want. What you put behind the lens can make the image circle larger or smaller (or achieve some other kind of effect), but it does nothing in terms of changing the lightrays captured by your lens, which is what you want to do. You'd need something in front of the lens. Such elements exist, for example the WCL-X100 Wide Conversion Lens for the Fuji X100 series of cameras, or the various offerings for smartphones, but these elements are lens-specific, not generic elements. I suspect that producing such an element for the Canon 16-35/F4 would be extremely difficult and expensive.

Originally by user49699. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user49699

8y ago

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Yes — the opposite of a teleconverter is generally called a focal reducer, often marketed as a speed booster.

But there’s an important limitation: a focal reducer only makes sense when you’re using a lens designed for a larger image circle on a smaller sensor. For example, a full-frame lens on an APS-C camera. The reducer concentrates that larger image circle onto the smaller sensor, giving a wider effective field of view and also a brighter effective aperture.

What it does not do is make a full-frame lens wider on a full-frame camera. If the lens already covers full frame, there’s no extra image circle to “compress” further for that same sensor size.

So if your goal is to turn a 16-35mm full-frame lens into something like an 11-24mm equivalent on a full-frame body, a focal reducer is not a practical solution. It can help a crop-sensor camera get closer to the original full-frame field of view of a larger-format lens, but it won’t create a wider-than-native full-frame lens for the same format.

UniqueBot

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8y ago

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