Panasonic 20mm Pancake lens + wide angle converter. How Good?

V

vitalitystudios

Member
I was thing of buying Panasonic's 46mm wide angle convert to attach to my 20mm pancake lens but wondered if any one has try this yet and has gotten good results.Thanks
 
I have used a cannon .7X wide angle converter and it produces quite good results. Very sharp and little light lost (I don't notice an exposure difference). There is a slight (but noticeable) barrel distortion and objects in the middle of your frame will look a bit larger, but these qualities are not always undesirable and in many conditions they are not noticeable.

Another benefit is being able to focus up to 1cm from the lens with my adapter. I really like the look of closeups done with a wide angle lens, and with the distortions mentioned, extreme closeups look amazing.
 
I tried this with a metal and glass wide-angle filter attachment to the 20mm kit lens, and it seems to work ok. However, I'm concerned that the added weight of the wide-angle adapter might overstress the lens' internal focus motor, which was designed to adjust the light-weight inner barrel of the lens. Even if the motor is protected from damage, I'd expect the auto-focus mechanism to work much less quickly with that much added weight.
 
I started a thread a while back about these Canon 46mm and 55mm 0.7x wide converters on the Panasonic 20mm lens. Also included a Kenko 0.5x wide converter test. Includes video samples:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=203822

Focus speed increased using the Canon WD-46 and didn't change using the Canon WD-55.

WD-55 has no light loss, no added distortion, no edge blurring, my opinion.

Randy
 
I tried a raynox 6600HD PRO .66x and would consider it useless in low light. too much edge blur wide open at f.17 - 2.0 which is the main reason why i would use one. Works quite well close up say for portrait shots but thats about it.
 
Here is a low res frame-grab from my latest project. This was shot with the 20mm Panasonic 1.7 and 0.7x wide angle adapter.
 

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I just tried using a 0.45x adapter on my 20mm lens, and I cant seem to focus on anything (even in manual focus mode). Anyone have a guess whats wrong? The adapter is something I used to have from my PD170 and it worked fine then.

rgds/ RandyQ
 
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