I need a cheap wide angle lens. Recommendations?

rokinon/samyang 14mm 2.8 is probably the best choice ( it is also for full frame ) buy a nikon mount if you want a confirmation chip.
tokina is a great lens and on ff could be used as a 16mm. Both have some distortion ( apart from the distortion a wide angle always has but that's a different thing
sigma 8-16 or 12-24mm ( only downside is these are not as fast ) the latter has 2 versions the older one has less distortion and the new one is sharper but more distorted
canon 10-22 mm not so fast but minimal distortion

Always a hard choice but choose any of these and you'll be happy. Most wide angles are good so don't worry. even the tokina 12-24 is great and 12mm on crop is wide enough for most if not all you need
 
Gary Huff said:
The problem is that the Tokina is being used way too close to the subject, and the Century seems pointless because what's the point of shooting a close up with a wide angle? I would take the Tokina and shoot properly with a wide than the Century adapter and make everything else look all wonky in the background any day.
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The Tokina was much farther from the salesman's head then the Century from the ball and the ball is still correct. The wonky stretched head will never work for me or my clients.

I often shoot wide very close to my subject if that's my shot and I want to control the distortion of the objects in the shot.

In the case of the background being wonky, I would limit my background to subjects that would not be obviously distorted. I purposely shot this test with pillars on each side to illustrate how the lens functions. This lens selection would be more useful with an organic background like a sky, beach, mountains, forest, etc., where you won't notice the distortion while keeping your subject (people in my case) looking normal.
The Century I've had in my bag for 20 years. I bought it originally to go on the front of a canon L1 in 1991 when there were limited choices for wide lenses on those cameras. The L1 hit the dumpster about 1995 but the Century has been used in emergency situations on many different lenses in every format since 1995. I used it with a Ziess 16mm Distagon on my 35mm Arri where a Zeiss 10mm would have been a fortune. I'd say I got my $275s worth from that adapter.
I agree it doesn't fit all situations, but it's a learning tool and that's the point, learning to improve your work.
In fact I think I'm going to pick up one of these x.3 and x.45 wide adapters off ebay. Wonky might be just what I'm looking for when I get board with normal.
 
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I'd steer away from those ebay wide adapters: I have a $30 one (seller sent wrong item, it was supposed to be something else) and it utterly destroys the image: extremely soft at any aperture, and with CA in the order of dozens of pixels (in stills mode) (edit: I just measured it on my original 550D/T2i test: CA is 9 pixels in the center, 26 pixels in the corner, which makes the image unbearable)
 
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