What is the opposite of a fisheye lens, and are there lenses designed for pincushion distortion?
Asked 4/22/2017
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I know a fisheye lens gives an extremely wide field of view and bends straight lines except near the center. Is its “opposite” a lens intentionally designed with pincushion distortion, or is that the wrong way to think about it?
What kind of lens projection would be considered the opposite of fisheye, and what would an intentionally pincushion-distorted lens even look like in practice?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
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The opposite of a fisheye is a rectilinear lens.
You probably did not find one because your definition is wrong. Distortion of a fisheye lenses is not barrel distortion, it is that a different projection or mapping is obtained by design. Angles are usually preserved but not straight lines, unless they pass through the center of the frame.
A rectilinear lens on the other hand is designed to preserve straight lines, regardless of where they occur in the frame. This makes it impossible to map an angle of view close to 180 into a flat image.
Wikipedia has interesting diagrams showing the difference and even various types of fisheye lens projects.
Originally by user1620. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1620
9y ago
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The useful opposite of a fisheye is a rectilinear lens, not a lens designed for pincushion distortion.
A fisheye is not really “barrel distortion on purpose.” It uses a different projection that allows an extremely wide angle of view by sacrificing straight lines away from the center. A rectilinear lens does the opposite tradeoff: it preserves straight lines across the frame, but this makes very wide angles increasingly stretched toward the edges and prevents a full 180° view from being mapped cleanly onto a flat image.
So the real contrast is fisheye projection vs. rectilinear projection, not barrel vs. pincushion distortion.
Pincushion distortion is generally considered an optical aberration, not a desirable lens design goal. You could create that look in software, but purpose-built photographic lenses are normally designed to minimize distortion or to use a known projection such as rectilinear or fisheye.
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