Elgeet C mount 13mm

Today I got the adaptor to allow me to put my newly purchased lens onto my G1 to see how it goes.

The lens is a C mount lens which I thought I'd give a test drive to (seeing as there is quite a hullabloo about this stuff on the net). My guess is that its designed for 16mm cinema as it covers way more than 8mm would need.

Anyway I expected that these lenses were some sort of "fad" in the market as I wasn't sure if they would cover the sensor (16mm being smaller size than 4/3rds sensor size) or have reasonable 'resolution'.

This one came up on eBay at an attractive price so I thought "what the hell" and bought it so I could actually see for myself (and not many people are posting much about this topic yet).

Below I'll place some test images and comparisons to the kit lens which comes with the G1. The kit lens is 14mm which is in theory should make an image not quite as wide as 13mm (if it covered enough of the sensor).

Here is a couple of example shots of the lens on the camera:



and



These are from my Flickr account, so if you click on them it'll take you there (where there is some comments on the images).

Firstly lets look at coverage. The image below is simply resized from the camera and shows what you will get:



so clearly it misses out on covering the width and the corners. Since it does not cover as much width as the kit lens (14-45mm) it is effectively not as wide because it does not cover enough of the sensor (and you'll also waste some of your image by cropping out bits).

So, lets look at the details. The 3 images below are 100% magnification views of:

upper right

shows its falling off in detail to the edge significantly

upper left

as expected shows the same thing.

the center

seems to show that the image is quite comparable with the quality of the standard kit lens. Not bad really for a very old bit of gear.

my conclusion

This lens is f2.4 while the kit lens is around f3.5 both are reasonably bright but the kit lens has the advantage of being free (came with the camera) and having OIS which more than makes up for the little less brightness that it has. In the center its pretty darn sharp, and comparable to my kit lens with both at f16.

The Elgeet is 'focus free' (meaning its focused at somewhere in the middle distance) and essentially everything from a few meters away to infinity is as sharp as anything else.

Would I buy it? Well ... perhaps not if I'd read this first;-)

So now I know.

Since I have the adaptor I'm intending to try some other C-mount lenses and see how I go. Have a look for the label C Mount over there in the left column to see what happens...

:-)