Comments

GeeBax wrote on 1/25/2014, 12:23 AM
They are a relatively new development and are gaining rapid favour among owners of the Blackmagic range of cameras, particularly the MFT equipped Cinema and Pocket Cinema cameras, as way to utilise the full coverage of the cropped sensors.

The BM cinema camera only has a passive mount, so cannot utilise any of the power driven functions on lenses, whereas the Pocket has an active mount.

Of course this requires Metabones to make active Speedboosters, something they have not yet done for all models.

But they are a great way to use old C mount glass, which is now seeing something of a revival.

Geoff
Laurence wrote on 1/25/2014, 12:26 AM
These require you to shoot full manual.
farss wrote on 1/25/2014, 1:06 AM
The concept is far from new either it's just that it's been quite expensive and targeted at the high end of the market. Results are dependant on the sensor and the lens in front of the adaptor.

The other neat trick that's now also popular is under scanning the sensor. I'm told Sony's F5 and F55 can scan only 2K of the sensor and then you can use S16 glass which is quite cheap. One F5 owner I know makes quite a bit of use of this by running with an old, cheap S16 lens for the ENG work and swapping to a full frame lens for VFX work that needs the 4K.

Bob.
Ian E Pearson wrote on 1/28/2014, 7:59 PM
I guess my frustration with this is that back around '06 when I was messing around with hd100u and z1u cameras, I was told numerous times, and the general consensus in the 35mm adapter communties, was that it was not possible without a clunky adapter with a ground glass that lost light and added all kinds of grainy goodness. Now all of a sudden its possible to both increase the speed and decrease depth of field with one small 500 dollar adapter. Amazing.

Maybe because it goes on the back of the lens? Would this be possible for a hd100u or a xlh1 to bump it up to 1/2inch or 2/3 inch? I realize that there would be very limited interest, and that no one will make one. But would it be POSSIBLE on those cameras?
corug7 wrote on 1/28/2014, 9:03 PM
The main problem is the smaller sensor size of handycam style cameras. Adaptimax makes lens adapters for the Sony EX3 that allow the use of Canon or Nikon lenses, but at a crop factor of 5.4x over full frame. That makes almost all still lenses telephoto, but with less of the desired shallow depth of field.

With fixed lens cameras like the Z1U, there are two issues to deal with: Adding a lens inverts the picture, and the fixed lens needs an image large enough on which to focus. The ground glass adapters worked well because the image on the ground glass was approximate to a 35mm frame (good for shallow depth of field) and large enough to allow fixed lenses to focus on them, and most of the well known adapters offered the option of a prism to flip the image upright.