Advice on combo .45 wide angle / macro lenses?

[pbrazina]

Any advice on combo .45x wide angle lenses with built in macro?

I was in San Francisco this past week and saw a combo lens selling for about $199... saw same thing on ebay for about $45... tested it in San Fran, and it was pretty impressive. I think the company was "Digital Optics", but I could be wrong... either way, both the wide angle and macro were nice... even in low lighting...
There was no tunnel effects either.


Looking for CHEAP, but good wide-angle for my Sony FD92... any help is appreciated.

[richardh]

Are you sure they were the same brand?

[shene]

Originally Posted by pbrazina

I was in San Francisco this past week and saw a combo lens selling for about $199... saw same thing on ebay for about $45... tested it in San Fran, and it was pretty impressive. I think the company was "Digital Optics", but I could be wrong... either way, both the wide angle and macro were nice... even in low lighting...

Do you mean a lens like the following? This shows the one with 28mm thread size; however, other thread sizes (e.g., 37mm) are available. If you do mean this lens, $40+ is a reasonable price. The $199 one may be a branded lens (e.g., Phoenix, etc).



If you care about quality, this is perhaps not the lens you want. Its center sharpness is reasonable and the sharpness decreases quickly toward the edges. Furthermore, barrel distortion is significant as shown in the following image. However, it is cheap.

Originally Posted by pbrazina

Looking for CHEAP, but good wide-angle for my Sony FD92... any help is appreciated.

A cheap and good wide angle lens does not exist. Of course, it depends on the way of defining "good." If the barrel distortion shown above is not an issue and you can tolerate soft to very soft edge sharpness, this may be the lens for you. One more warning. You can easily get flare if you point to it to a strong light source, and chromatic aberration, normally purple fringing, may be serious between high contrast areas.

CK
http://www.cs.mtu.edu/~shene/DigiCam
Nikon Coolpix 950/990/995/2500/4500 User Guide