Hi everyone,
I was in a business trip at the Northern part of Turkey on the last week of 2010. And I moved down to the Southern Part of Turkey for new years day. My new toy was arrived just before I left Ankara and I had some chance to test this nice piece on the way. I am talking about a new high quality 35 mm lens adapter: Showtime 35mm Adapter!
Although it is a bit pricey (I paid 600 USD, including 3 day shipment), it only consists of basically a tube and a high quality close up lens. But, I found this device quite useful and vignetting was gone from 3x on my TM700 camcorder. I saw easily my lenses real capabilities via this adapter. I uploaded 3 quick bird footages.
Here is Syrian Woodpecker:
http://www.vimeo.com/18420202
Here is Eurasian Jay:
http://www.vimeo.com/18411239
Here is European Serin:
http://www.vimeo.com/18421411
I took 15+ species video footage in two days, spending 2-3 hours around the places that I stayed. It is hard to miss a species on the field with this set up. Because this set up gives me approximately 300mm to 3600mm autofocus (manuel helped) zoom without vignetting. I believe that this set up can only be comparable with Kowa 883+TSN-WA3 eyepiece (+same camcorder). But my set up is under 40 cm long and is 11 cm width (widest extension). Kowa has one 88mm pure fluorite element on the front glass. But Pentax has 4 very special big lens elements on the front block. These are 3 ED glass (Starting 77 mm to smaller, and ED feature is far better than today's ED glasses), and a tantalum and niobium oxide containing high refractive index glass, which was only used in very special lenses i.e. leica noctilux.
Considering Showtime 35mm adapter; I bought this adapter from a Taiwanese guy, who is also a birder: Frank Wu. I believe he designed the adapter and produced in china (I have to confirm this). He is very helpful and a good birder. Here are his bird samples with canon 300mm lens and this adapter:
http://www.vimeo.com/2880285
Like every beauty it has a drawback: the image on the lcd is upside down and until you get some experience, it is quite hard to find the birds. I am looking for a prism or mirror that the lcd image flip. But if I can not find a basic device I will continue as it is. On the other hand, the recorded footage is also upside down. It can be easily converted via a suitable software. An other prism system can be added to this adapter to flip the image, but every element you add to the system will degrade image quality and increase vignetting. So I am very satisfied with this set up, and I recommend it to those who can live with the 180 degree flipped image. I have some bigger monster lenses i. e. Contax TeleApoTessar 400mm and Nikkor 180-600mm f8 zoom, and I believe image quality can be a bit higher than this. But optimization for the field is important for me and this set up gives me only 1.5-1.7 kg weight, which is same weight of the lightest high quality scope on the market (Kowa 883).
The camcorder records 50 frame per second. So I did some framegrabs from my footages. The samples are attached. If someone considers using this with a compact digital camera or a DSLR, I am sure he/she can achieve better results.
Another issue is; I found some amount of chromatic aberration on some of my footages. I am sure Pentax lens is an apochromatically corrected lens (almost). But I noticed that, when I did not focus the lens precisely, although the image is sharp, there occurs some CA.
I will continue to upload my footages. Any questions are welcome. Best wishes for 2011.
Murat F. Özçelik
I was in a business trip at the Northern part of Turkey on the last week of 2010. And I moved down to the Southern Part of Turkey for new years day. My new toy was arrived just before I left Ankara and I had some chance to test this nice piece on the way. I am talking about a new high quality 35 mm lens adapter: Showtime 35mm Adapter!
Although it is a bit pricey (I paid 600 USD, including 3 day shipment), it only consists of basically a tube and a high quality close up lens. But, I found this device quite useful and vignetting was gone from 3x on my TM700 camcorder. I saw easily my lenses real capabilities via this adapter. I uploaded 3 quick bird footages.
Here is Syrian Woodpecker:
http://www.vimeo.com/18420202
Here is Eurasian Jay:
http://www.vimeo.com/18411239
Here is European Serin:
http://www.vimeo.com/18421411
I took 15+ species video footage in two days, spending 2-3 hours around the places that I stayed. It is hard to miss a species on the field with this set up. Because this set up gives me approximately 300mm to 3600mm autofocus (manuel helped) zoom without vignetting. I believe that this set up can only be comparable with Kowa 883+TSN-WA3 eyepiece (+same camcorder). But my set up is under 40 cm long and is 11 cm width (widest extension). Kowa has one 88mm pure fluorite element on the front glass. But Pentax has 4 very special big lens elements on the front block. These are 3 ED glass (Starting 77 mm to smaller, and ED feature is far better than today's ED glasses), and a tantalum and niobium oxide containing high refractive index glass, which was only used in very special lenses i.e. leica noctilux.
Considering Showtime 35mm adapter; I bought this adapter from a Taiwanese guy, who is also a birder: Frank Wu. I believe he designed the adapter and produced in china (I have to confirm this). He is very helpful and a good birder. Here are his bird samples with canon 300mm lens and this adapter:
http://www.vimeo.com/2880285
Like every beauty it has a drawback: the image on the lcd is upside down and until you get some experience, it is quite hard to find the birds. I am looking for a prism or mirror that the lcd image flip. But if I can not find a basic device I will continue as it is. On the other hand, the recorded footage is also upside down. It can be easily converted via a suitable software. An other prism system can be added to this adapter to flip the image, but every element you add to the system will degrade image quality and increase vignetting. So I am very satisfied with this set up, and I recommend it to those who can live with the 180 degree flipped image. I have some bigger monster lenses i. e. Contax TeleApoTessar 400mm and Nikkor 180-600mm f8 zoom, and I believe image quality can be a bit higher than this. But optimization for the field is important for me and this set up gives me only 1.5-1.7 kg weight, which is same weight of the lightest high quality scope on the market (Kowa 883).
The camcorder records 50 frame per second. So I did some framegrabs from my footages. The samples are attached. If someone considers using this with a compact digital camera or a DSLR, I am sure he/she can achieve better results.
Another issue is; I found some amount of chromatic aberration on some of my footages. I am sure Pentax lens is an apochromatically corrected lens (almost). But I noticed that, when I did not focus the lens precisely, although the image is sharp, there occurs some CA.
I will continue to upload my footages. Any questions are welcome. Best wishes for 2011.
Murat F. Özçelik