wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: Raynox DCR-CF185PRO( was Another introduction)
Wim Koornneef 2006-Mar-22 13:53:00
Hello Bj?rn,
>BTW, I read some of your(?) comments/warnings about that lens at
><http://www.kekus.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1006>http://www.kekus.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1006
Indeed, thats me, the only "MacUser" that signs with "Wim" ;-)
>You don't happen to have any of your raw 185 shots so that I could try to
>stitch them? I guess even rather lo-res versions would be able to convince me?
So sorry, but I throw away all test material
after I returned the lens to the vendor.
But I have a suggestion so you can do a little resardh yourself:
On the site of Raynox you can see some example images of the 185Pro lens.
One is taken in a park, in the image you can
several lanterns. As you take a closer look at
those lantarns then you see that the lanterns in
the middel part of the image are not bending as
much as they should when taken with a "normal"
fisheye lens, this points to the fact the 185pro
is not a "normal" fisheye.
When you just remap that image with a panotools
plugin to a sphere (equirectangular) format,
without using any lens correction factors, you
can see that regarddless the angle you use
180-185-190-195 degree all objects with vertical
lines that are close to centre of the remapped
image all are pincussioned, while at the edge all
objects are extremely curved and pushed/pressed
into a small area.
Perhaps you already know that all vertical lines
in a sphere image must be straight, otherwise you
can't stitch them together.
This simple test shows that there is a lot of
correction needed in PanoTools to solve this
issue.
You can get at best an average result with the
185Pro but after I read your goal I am sure that
the 185Pro lens is not the lens your looking for.
As you can read in my comment I was very pleased
with this lens and I pitty that I had to return
it so my opinio is not biassed.
I suggest that after reading this comment, and
doing some tests yourself on the example images,
uour still not convinced, could be ;-) you try it
yourself, there is a very little chance that it
will perform better on your camera then it did on
my Panasonic. I doubt it because the Nikon FC-E9
performed well on my FX5 (except for the lack of
sharpness).
BTW, did you noticed that Raynox do not promote this lens for making VR panos ?
The big silence about this major option of a fisheyelens tells us a lot.......
Success, regards Wim.
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