Best wide-angle adapter for Voigtlander 25mm f0.95?

I would shy away from using those infront-of-lens wide or tele adaptors. Generally they degrade the quality of the image more than it is worth....
 
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that a $10 cheap-o adapter like that one would degrade the image quality, but the question is: are there better ones out there? And how much do they cost? I wouldn't mind paying a few hundred bucks to make the 25mm f0.95 lens a bit wider...
 
I was planning on working up a buzz by telling people I had a 16mm f/0.95 lens. The secret was that I managed to steal a RedEye wide-angle adapter off ebay for the grand total of ... $0.99! That's a $500 adapter. And granted there's a little fleck on the front, but for a buck I wasn't complaining.

However -- it's pointless to use with the Voigtlander. First, as a non-zoom-thru adapter that's made to work with a video camera zoom lens, it changes the focus point dramatically. You don't focus by scale anymore, and infinity is most definitely not infinity. It shifts the whole focus scale closer.

Secondly, it does add some barrel distortion and a little CA on the edges.

Now, while you can work around #1 and #2, what you can't work around is that the lens vignettes nastily at wide-open apertures. There's visible vignetting in the corners -- and it's not vignetting in the aspect that it's seeing part of the lens, but rather, well, I think it's vignetting along the lines of that the aperture is too big, and so it's letting in image that's not ... how do I say it -- it's not on the right optical path for the aperture? I don't know, sounds crazy, but the fact of the matter is if you point it at a blue sky, you won't get a uniform blue sky until you've stopped down to at least f/2.8, maybe f/4. So it will work to expand the field of view, but at the expense of taking away the voigtlander's chief feature, which is the hyper-fast f-stop.

In other words, at least with the RedEye 62mm 0.65x adapter, it's been an epic fail.

Next I'll try it on the 14-140 and see how that performs, but the RedEye is a high-quality video wide-angle adapter and it failed on the Voigtlander so I don't have a lot of optimism for the idea of any wide-angle adapter working on it.
 
I´m in the verge of doing the same with a 16mm lens, the GH2 and ETC mode to get back some of the wide. It´s a pity it vignettes. Maybe with a different WA converter zoom through and a bigger filter size it would work. IMO it´s worth the try!
 
I think fast and wide at the moment is only possible with the 20mm pancake. the 7-14 is incredible, its my next lens when I have some extra cash but f4 is not fast...since the 20mm pancake can do f1.7 I wonder if fast 10mm wont be asking too much laws of physics considered.
 
I've been thinking seriously about that 7-14 as well. Although there's some 2.8 8mm fisheyes that seem very reasonably priced so I might try that. Sometimes I want that in yo face fisheye quality. The 14mm on the zoom lens is pretty decent for most applications but for some other stuff might be nice to be able to stretch out.


Since ther'es so much buzz about a wide fast zoom, I'm sure you'll see a few manufacturers getting onboad. Personally I'd love to see a 14-35 at a 2.8 or faster for a grand. That would sell like hotcakes. I have the more telephoto range pretty well covered now....


Its fun buying lenses. There's some cheap great deals out there!
 
Justyn said:
I've been thinking seriously about that 7-14 as well. Although there's some 2.8 8mm fisheyes that seem very reasonably priced so I might try that. Sometimes I want that in yo face fisheye quality.
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You can get some excellent distortion when shooting really close, out of the 7-14. What you don't get is the round barrel distortion on the edges. Here are a few shots from the 7-14 that I just love...

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Personally I'd love to see a 14-35 at a 2.8 or faster for a grand. That would sell like hotcakes.
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Olympus has a 12-60 at f/2.8 on the wide, for $799. And Panasonic has a Leica 14-50, with 2.8 on the wide, for $899.
 
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