A Wide Angle Converter Lens
I've written a few times about a long-discontinued classic Fuji compact camera that I finally found a few months ago after a years-long search but I thought I'd write about it again.
This little camera is a really outstanding compact camera but I'm always looking for ways to improve whatever gear I use. In this case, getting a slightly wider view would be nice for those occasional times when you need a slightly wider view.
I've had a few different wide angle converter lenses on hand for many years... perhaps decades, actually! I dug them out to give each of them a try. I think the smallest one I own has worked best. Below, you can see this converter lens sitting next to the Fuji X30 camera.
Seeing the selfie shot reminds me that I could use a few more current self-portraits. I'll have to come up with a few ideas for that and then actually capture a few decent images.
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EDIT: September 28th, 2023 - I found another old wide angle converter lens last night hiding in plain sight among my lens collection so I ran a few more tests this morning. The funny thing is that both converter lenses are 0.45x but each of them has a vastly different field of view which you'll clearly see in the sample images below. The distortion when using either of these converter lenses is actually terrible which, unfortunately, renders them pretty much useless to me for the Fuji X30.
The first converter lens I used and wrote about above was a black 0.45x lens, this one is a silver 0.45x lens. It is actually a physically larger lens than the lens mentioned above.
Since it is a little bit larger than the first converter lens, it seems a bit unbalanced on the little Fuji X30. I'm not too fond of the color of this lens on the all black Fuji X30 either.
I shot a couple of additional photos. This first one, below, is showing this second converter lens. The red box depicts what the widest view through the camera is without any wide angle converter lens at 28mm (full frame equivalent). This lens is a better quality than the first one I tested above and its field of view is probably similar to 25mm (again, full frame equivalent). Once I corrected for the distortion, the edges and corners look acceptable for snapshots but, as I said, I had to do the correction on the computer in post-processing and I'm not too fond of needing that extra step when using this particular camera. That defeats the purpose of a "snapshot".
The next image shows the view using the wide angle converter lens I first tested above in this blog entry. This first wide angle converter lens clearly shows a significantly wider view than the second silver one. Once I corrected for distortion the edges and corners aren't horrendous. Getting this undistorted view required some post-processing on the computer though and I'd like to avoid that when using this camera.
I have to say, however, that the corrected image from this first wide angle converter lens is a bit better than I thought it would be. When I saw the uncorrected image straight out of the camera, I was not impressed in the least! By comparison, this corrected image below isn't too bad. I didn't take any measurements but, from my own experience, I'd say this photo below shows a field of view close to using a 22mm lens (full frame equivalent).
I decided to add one more sample image, below. This photo shows an image that is straight out of the camera and uncorrected when using the first converter lens from the beginning of this blog.
The edges of the frame are quite blurry/soft and there is terrible vignetting in the corners. For the image, above, I had corrected the distortion and cropped out the vignetted corners. I found that I can minimize the vignetting by zooming from 28mm to around 32mm but, if I am going to edit the photo in post-processing anyway, I'd might as well shoot it at the widest end of the lens, 28mm. When I correct for the distortion, those blackened corners disappeared because of the crop that was necessary to crop out the curved edges of the frame.
To get straight lines through the image, I end up with curved edges of the image and then need to crop. I think that correcting for the distortion also minimizes the blurriness at the edges. What was stretched out in the original image is then compressed and made a little sharper.
One of the main advantages of using my Fuji X30 is that I like the images straight out of the camera. This is not the case when using a wide angle converter lens on this camera. The distortion is so bad that it requires some post-processing work to remove the distortion and to cut out the blurry edges and corners. Consequently, using the camera's Panorama feature is probably a better way to capture a wider view.
So, I've put away both wide angle converter lenses and I think I'll continue to use this camera as it was intended.... sans extra converter lenses and using the images straight-out-of-the-camera.
We'll see... I'll probably change my mind a few times!
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