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APSc
fisheyes |
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35mm
fisheyes |
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MF
fisheyes |
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Underwater |
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special |
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adapters |
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theory |
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literature |
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©luca
vascon 2006 |
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| type |
years
and variants |
elements-groups |
f.stop |
angle
of view, h,v,diag |
| circular |
in production |
10\6 |
5.2 |
185° |
| image
circle |
close
focus |
filters |
dimensions
(max diameter, lenght, weight) |
No
Parallax Point (from bajonet) |
| 14.9mm |
fixed |
no |
82.87 x 101 mm |
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| officially Nikon
and EOS mount |
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| photo:luca
vascon |
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What is this strange monster?? Midway between an FC-E8
Nikon converter and an 8mm f2.8 Nikkor Fisheye dream, it is, however
NOT a cheap fisheye, and NOT a crappy converter. First of all, it
is the ONLY real circular fisheye lens made for an APS-C sensor, second
it delivers outstanding quality.Well, it is a 4.000$ lens. In these
pictures you can see it on hand, and it was shoot on a film nikon
camera, although it was made for it, only to evaluate dimensions.
It has no focusing control, nor diafragm settings, fixed hyperfocal
at f/5.2
It is delivered in two flavours; Canon or Nikon mount. But obviously
I had a Nikon to Canon adater to fit both the cameras |
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At a closer look I discovered that... this unique lens shows a T2
universal mount!!!! So it can be easily removed to fit whatever camera.
I cannot grant this to be a standard production piece, that looks
quite different in the mounting zone. However the Nikon adaptersupplied
was really nothing special, not really tight to the camera and without
anti-twist mechanism. It locked on the AI-S pin of the Nikon 301 (a
Nikon bayonet pin adopted in all cameras with T and P modes, from
FA till some modern film AF ones) compelling me to do some magic ritual
to remove it from the camera. |
Photo: courtesy Coastal opt. |
What's the place of this lens in the universe and in the market?
Well, it is a 4.000$ lens, without diafragm and focusing, two things
that baybe are not so necessary.
One of the use was surely to shoot the 2-hemisphere panoramic pictures
in the best quality possible (it spots a 185 degrees circle!) the
other could be measurements, surveys, scientific use, like a cloud
camera. This lens in fact claims to record a perfect equisolid
geometry. The other way to do it is to use a fullframe digital sensor,
with another outstanding quality circular fisheye, but I'm not so
sure that would be the right solution, expecially if you want to
use hi-grade custom video sensors.
The image in the viewfinder is bright and crisp, usable till the
very end, with trascurable vignetting, no color separation at borders
and controlled flare. This is a really wellmade optic! Well, but
a diafragm.....
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Links
Coastal
fisheye page
Downloads:
pgui template with the
lens values (camera eos 20d)
.rar file with
the 3 original images AND the template. BEWARE, 6megabytes.
Original .pdf
catalogue from the Coastal optical company |
I had to check the lens fast, so I forgot an high iso rating on
the camera, sorry for the noisy panoramic pictures. :-( |
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