Tele-Conversion Lenses for the DMC-FZ30

[romphotog]

DMW-LT55: 1.7 x 420mm = 714mm $200
TCON-17: 1.7 $100
Why such a difference in price?

These lenses are front mounted, not between the camera and the lens as in SLRs, thereby worsening the image.
If you double your focal length while keeping the aperture the same size only 1/4 the amount of light is now hitting the lens. You have lost 2 stops. Thus, is it better to use its extended zoom, instead of the TC lens, even if at 5mp?

How is the image with the TC and using the EZ?

[genece]

The Panasonic accesories are overpriced...it seems the Tcon 17 is on par with the panasonic but slightly behind the nikon 1.7.

And while your logic seems to make sense it is not at all true....I have many photos to compare with teleconverter and without and see not real difference in the light.....in fact they claim there is no loss but you can not prove it by me.

I also have used a Tcon17 with 3 EZ with what I consider good results.

Here is a photo at 3EZ and a Tcon17... And if you notice almost no fringing that most people claim the Tcon17 has.

[WackyRoger]

Genece, a very nice photo that IMHO proves your point.

TOTALLY WACKY roger
FZ 30, Nikon TCE17, QuikAim Max RDS, Zeiss Digiscope/Sony W7


genece wrote:

The Panasonic accesories are overpriced...it seems the Tcon 17 is on par with the panasonic but slightly behind the nikon 1.7.

And while your logic seems to make sense it is not at all true....I have many photos to compare with teleconverter and without and see not real difference in the light.....in fact they claim there is no loss but you can not prove it by me.

I also have used a Tcon17 with 3 EZ with what I consider good results.

Here is a photo at 3EZ and a Tcon17... And if you notice almost no fringing that most people claim the Tcon17 has.

[bkrownd]

romphotog wrote:

If you double your focal length while keeping the aperture the same size only 1/4 the amount of light is now hitting the lens. You have lost 2 stops. Thus, is it better to use its extended zoom, instead of the TC lens, even if at 5mp?

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Compare the size of the primary lenses on the camera and the teleconverter - the aperture that collects/admits light into the camera's optical system. The aperture is much larger on the teleconverter, so it collects more light. This is balanced to some extent by the fact that the light is spread over a larger area of the detector. (I suspect related to the 'focal length' part you mention.) I think that might also account for the reduced solid angle part of the etendue...I'd have to think about that one.

[JohnK]

Great shot genece!


romphotog wrote:

Thus, is it better to use its extended zoom, instead of the TC lens, even if at 5mp?

I don't think so. A TC is an optical zoom that actually magnifies the image, 'EZ' is just another way of saying 'cropped image'. If you're not putting in more glass to actually magnify the image you're not doing anything you can't do with your favorite image editor later and have that much more of the original to work with.

Here are 100% crops of 4 photos at different EZ settings. As you can see the EZ does nothing at all to actually zoom or magnify the image. These were taken using a tripod as quickly as I could adjust the EZ setting and set the timer for 2 seconds and press the shutter. There was a slight breeze moving the branchs around which accounts for the slight blur, these were at 1/250th, shutter priority which set F4.5 for the first 2 shots and F5 for the last 2.



I took this shot of a Big Horn sheep with the FZ30 and TCON17 at full res/full zoom from a moving tram. This is about a 80% crop from the original. Not as sharp as I'd hoped, but not too bad from a moving platform. I should have increased the shutter speed (only 1/400th in this shot) to get it sharper.

Give me a TC over EZ or digital zoom any day of the week!

[bkrownd]

JohnK wrote:

I don't think so. A TC is an optical zoom that actually magnifies the image, 'EZ' is just another way of saying 'cropped image'.

Here are 100% crops of 4 photos at different EZ settings. As you can see the EZ does nothing at all to actually zoom or magnify the image.

Yes, I noticed this while testing resolution at different zooms with my FZ7 over the weekend. How can they say the "optical zoom" is extended from 12x to 16.5x when all it's doing is cropping? Stupid!

Nice sheep, BTW. Those things are a major destructive pest here. I'd like to add some nice cross-hairs between his eyes. :evil:

[genece]

It may be all in the way you look at it, but I for one do not believe that 3EZ is a crop



Even if you do not agree with me, the optical zoom helps a lot with composing,focusing and metering a photo , so it is useful at least IMHO.

[JohnK]

Thanks bkrownd, that shot was taken at NW Trek kind of an open range zoo/park so no hunting.

Genece, you can believe it or not, it's simple enough for you to test it yourself, all of the EZ settings do NOTHING for the image but crop it down. It probably does makes the image look larger in the view finder or LCD, I was trying to get the shots off quickly so they were all as similar as possible and really didn't notice, which would aid in composing,focusing and metering a photo as you said, no argument there. But it absolutely does not increase the magnification of the subject at all. In the test shot I posted the top most branch of the tree is 212 pixels long on both the full 8mp and 3mp EZ shots.



That's not to say the FZ30+TCON17 doesn't zoom well, that pine tree I shot for that comparion shot is a good 100 feet tall and I was standing about 150' from the base of the tree. Seeing individual needles at that range impressed me.