Rear anamorphic adapters?

G

Greg_E

Veteran
So I've been playing with a cheap Century front mount focus through anamorphic adapter, and I'm seeing some serious shortfalls in performance. I've watched and read enough to know that stepping up to a better focus through like the SLR Magic is still a pretty limiting factor for lens focal length and over all performance. Dedicated anamorphic lenses are out of the reach of a lot of people, they are expensive for a reason. So I started searching for info about rear mounted adapters. What these offer is a wider range of supported focal lengths, no bad trends in near or far focus, etc. What they lack is the trendy flares that everyone seems to overdo, and some of the other anomalies like loss of a stop of light.

So what I'm thinking is that something similar to a speedbooster be used. Seems that with cameras like the Panasonic GH series there might be room between the flanges of say an EF lens and a GH body to put this rear amamorphic adapter. Duclos has listed a PL to PL rear adapter (out of stock), and I found "historical" references to other rear anamorphs scattered about the web, so not entirely a far fetched idea.

Is this a product that we as a community would want, and if so can we as a community convince someone like Metabones to make it? What would be the reasonable price for active and passive adapters? How much would be too much to charge? (no I'm not going to produce them)

Yes I did send a message to Mr. Caldwell to see if he had considered designing something like this that Metabones could produce, waiting for a reply and figured I would try and gauge interest.
 
Not in the less expensive range, I'm thinking in the same price range as a speedbooster which is right around the price of the SLR Magic front lens. If there are devices in this range, can you point me to them? The only ones I was seeing were several thousand and all for PL.
 
I found a thread from 2010 in here about the same subject, not much interest then either. Still think this would be a good idea.
 
Greg_E said:
So I've been playing with a cheap Century front mount focus through anamorphic adapter, and I'm seeing some serious shortfalls in performance. I've watched and read enough to know that stepping up to a better focus through like the SLR Magic is still a pretty limiting factor for lens focal length and over all performance. Dedicated anamorphic lenses are out of the reach of a lot of people, they are expensive for a reason. So I started searching for info about rear mounted adapters. What these offer is a wider range of supported focal lengths, no bad trends in near or far focus, etc. What they lack is the trendy flares that everyone seems to overdo, and some of the other anomalies like loss of a stop of light.

So what I'm thinking is that something similar to a speedbooster be used. Seems that with cameras like the Panasonic GH series there might be room between the flanges of say an EF lens and a GH body to put this rear amamorphic adapter. Duclos has listed a PL to PL rear adapter (out of stock), and I found "historical" references to other rear anamorphs scattered about the web, so not entirely a far fetched idea.

Is this a product that we as a community would want, and if so can we as a community convince someone like Metabones to make it? What would be the reasonable price for active and passive adapters? How much would be too much to charge? (no I'm not going to produce them)

Yes I did send a message to Mr. Caldwell to see if he had considered designing something like this that Metabones could produce, waiting for a reply and figured I would try and gauge interest.
Click to expand...

There are some technical hurdles that make a rear-mounted Speed Booster very difficult to design. Another important obstacle - which is true for any rear anamorphic adapter - is that you don't get the signature artifacts that make front anamorphics very popular.
 
Are they hurdles that make this something not worth doing? Not everyone wants the artifacts all the time and of course with a zoom it seems you need to use a rear mount adapter (or maybe center mount lens design). Overall I have a feeling that the desire isn't present and producing it would be a money loser, but was wishing for something that could be used with a wider range of lenses without messing around with diopters and double images or a double focus system with a projector lens.

I've looked at the SLR Magic Rangefinder and feel the overall flare to be too high, even in normal lighting without light hitting the lens it seems to flare a lot around the edges of objects. Same kind of thing goes for their front Anamorphot. Is there a way to design a front lens system that is better, but doesn't cost several thousand dollars to purchase? Maybe multi-coating all internal surfaces and leave the single front surface with the blue-ish single coating?
 
Greg_E said:
Are they hurdles that make this something not worth doing? Not everyone wants the artifacts all the time and of course with a zoom it seems you need to use a rear mount adapter (or maybe center mount lens design). Overall I have a feeling that the desire isn't present and producing it would be a money loser, but was wishing for something that could be used with a wider range of lenses without messing around with diopters and double images or a double focus system with a projector lens.

I've looked at the SLR Magic Rangefinder and feel the overall flare to be too high, even in normal lighting without light hitting the lens it seems to flare a lot around the edges of objects. Same kind of thing goes for their front Anamorphot. Is there a way to design a front lens system that is better, but doesn't cost several thousand dollars to purchase? Maybe multi-coating all internal surfaces and leave the single front surface with the blue-ish single coating?
Click to expand...

The basic design difficulty coupled with inherent market problems make a Speed Booster type rear anamorphic adapter really problematic IMO. In any case, high quality cylindrical glass is hard to make, and is accordingly expensive.
 
That's kind of what I thought. Would it be more likely to succeed if high quality optical plastics were used for the lenses?
 
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