As a little add on to this lens thing:
I have an XL2 and also have the 16x manual lens. I shoot almost exclusively with the manual lens and a Century OPtics .7x WA adapter on it. Why you ask?
2 reasons.
1.)The wide end of the 20x and 16x is just not wide enough. I need to shoot in small areas and don't have the time to be "swtitching" lenses on and off.
2.)The add on WA adapter degrades the image ever so slightly. Not in a bad way but in a softening way. Scenes shot through the 16xmanual and WA adapter look much more filmlike than the 20x at the same sharpness settings. IMHO
3)(Bonus reason)Shallow Depth of Field.Yes. That's right I said shallow. How can that be you ask? WA adapters typically give you are very deep DOF. Well my friends check this out if you will. At the widest setting is behaves exactly as you would expect. Everything is in focus.
However zooming in an even modest ammount and it gets shallow very quick. My theory is based on the concept of CCD target area versus Film target area. There was a good diagram on here some time ago explaining how 1/3 CCDS compared to 1/2, 2/3 and 35mm. This was to illustrate the 7x magnification when using 35mm lenses on the XL2. This also illustrated that for each format the ammount of the subject in frame changes. The example had a bride and groom (I think). The 1/3 inch area only saw the faces, the 1/2 saw the bodies too and the 35mm saw the bride and groom and all kinds of stuff around them. They should all have the same DOF at this point but the framing is different.
On the 35mm lens you zoom in more to frame the bodies and the depth of field decreases. Same for the 1/2 inch. But with a 1/3 inch you are already amost too zoomed in. You can't zoom anymore unless you move farther away from the subject. Does this make sense?
So to sum it up, having the .7x on the 16x manual lens actually optically pushes me farther away from my subjects. Therefore I have more room to zoom to "appropriate" framing and get shallower DOF. If I would normally set the lens to focus on someone 6 feet away, now with the adapter I focus on 10ft or so. It doesn't sound like much but in practice it makes a huge difference. I know because it can be a beotch too as the DOF becomes so shallow on even medium shots that I have a hard time being in focus as subjects move around. All in all I am getting more filmlike images.
FWIW.
I have an XL2 and also have the 16x manual lens. I shoot almost exclusively with the manual lens and a Century OPtics .7x WA adapter on it. Why you ask?
2 reasons.
1.)The wide end of the 20x and 16x is just not wide enough. I need to shoot in small areas and don't have the time to be "swtitching" lenses on and off.
2.)The add on WA adapter degrades the image ever so slightly. Not in a bad way but in a softening way. Scenes shot through the 16xmanual and WA adapter look much more filmlike than the 20x at the same sharpness settings. IMHO
3)(Bonus reason)Shallow Depth of Field.Yes. That's right I said shallow. How can that be you ask? WA adapters typically give you are very deep DOF. Well my friends check this out if you will. At the widest setting is behaves exactly as you would expect. Everything is in focus.
However zooming in an even modest ammount and it gets shallow very quick. My theory is based on the concept of CCD target area versus Film target area. There was a good diagram on here some time ago explaining how 1/3 CCDS compared to 1/2, 2/3 and 35mm. This was to illustrate the 7x magnification when using 35mm lenses on the XL2. This also illustrated that for each format the ammount of the subject in frame changes. The example had a bride and groom (I think). The 1/3 inch area only saw the faces, the 1/2 saw the bodies too and the 35mm saw the bride and groom and all kinds of stuff around them. They should all have the same DOF at this point but the framing is different.
On the 35mm lens you zoom in more to frame the bodies and the depth of field decreases. Same for the 1/2 inch. But with a 1/3 inch you are already amost too zoomed in. You can't zoom anymore unless you move farther away from the subject. Does this make sense?
So to sum it up, having the .7x on the 16x manual lens actually optically pushes me farther away from my subjects. Therefore I have more room to zoom to "appropriate" framing and get shallower DOF. If I would normally set the lens to focus on someone 6 feet away, now with the adapter I focus on 10ft or so. It doesn't sound like much but in practice it makes a huge difference. I know because it can be a beotch too as the DOF becomes so shallow on even medium shots that I have a hard time being in focus as subjects move around. All in all I am getting more filmlike images.
FWIW.
