Will a dedicated fisheye lens be much sharper than a cheap fisheye attachment?
Asked 1/5/2011
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2 answers
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I’m using a low-cost Opteka fisheye attachment and getting fun results, but sharpness falls off dramatically away from the center. I know fisheye lenses and wide apertures can soften toward the edges, but with this attachment the blur is severe enough that the images aren’t really suitable for printing.
If I replace the attachment with a dedicated fisheye lens from Canon or Sigma, how much improvement in image quality should I expect? Is a proper fisheye lens generally worth the extra cost compared with a screw-on attachment?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
15y ago
2 Answers
7
Adding an additional piece of glass to an already complex arrangement of elements is, at the very basic level, something that can degrade the performance of the lens. Adding one that is designed to optically alter the lens raises even greater risk, this is, after all, not explicitly designed to work with the lens. On that basis, you're already in the optical "hole" here as it were.
A dedicated fisheye lens is specifically designed to be such a lens and the combination of optical elements are there to handle the result of that. So, even the cheaper end of the fisheye lens options is very likely to perform better than your current combination. A better grade of lens is just going to be better in result. The same holds true for macro attachments and other forms of front or rear element items designed to change the essential optical properties of the lens.
Originally by user472. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user472
15y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Yes — a dedicated fisheye lens should be dramatically better.
A screw-on fisheye attachment adds extra glass in front of an existing lens, and because it isn’t designed as an integrated optical system for that lens, it often causes major loss of sharpness, especially away from the center. That’s the basic downside of front-mounted converter attachments in general.
A true fisheye lens is designed from the start to produce that extreme field of view and distortion while controlling image quality as well as possible across the frame. So even a relatively modest dedicated fisheye lens from a major maker is very likely to outperform a cheap attachment by a wide margin.
Fisheyes can still show some edge softness compared with more conventional lenses, but the severe blur you’re seeing is much more typical of the attachment than of a proper fisheye lens.
So if you want images that hold up better for printing, moving from a cheap attachment to a dedicated Canon or Sigma fisheye is generally worth it.
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