wideangle for super8?

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jean
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wideangle for super8?

Post by jean »

Sorry if this is a beginners question beaten to death somwhere, but at least my first search attempts did not leverage much.

I'm planning to shoot some wintersports action, and to exaggerate the illusion of speed with some perspective distortion, thought that wideangle shots would be useful. I then tried it with my stuff, ranging from fleamarket cheapo plastic to beaulieu - but the widest setting is between 6mm and 8mm in all my cameras, and does not look like wide angle at all.

Seems funny to me, no wide angle for super8? Was the "taste" more towards the tele side in the seventies, or are wide lenses hard to manufacture in that format?

I found posts about wide adapters for certain lenses, are they worth the price and effort to dig them up, or does image quality then suffer to much? can they be used on any lens they fit on, or are they calculated specially just for one lens?

jean
jukkasil
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Post by jukkasil »

I own Canon C-8 wide (4.5 mm) lens for my Canon 1014 XL-S model.

I also own original 4 mm wide angle lens for my Eumig 880 PMA.
You can use that Eumig lens in all Eumig 880/860, Revue TM6/TM8 and Bolex 680 cameras (= the same camera-model).

Nizo made also own wide angle lens for their models, it's suitable for some of Bauer camera models too. I have transfered to digital couple footage shot with Bauer A 512 and video wide angle lens (raynox). They looked just fine.

About Beualieu I'm not sure. Maybe you'd try to find the real wide range c-mount optics to avoid focusing problems.
Best Regards

Jukka Sillanpaa
Lucas Lightfeat
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Post by Lucas Lightfeat »

As most beaulieus came with a schneider kreusnach zoom lens, the Nizo (schn. Kr.) UW3 is the normal wide lens adapter, which some beaulieu kits were supplied with, though the Canon C-8 will also fit and work as good (both 67mm thread).

Lucas
shralp
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Post by shralp »

If you have c-mount capabilites with your Beaulieu, you might want to look at getting some of the wide angle lenses offered from Angenieux and Kinoptiks. Our angenieux 5.9mm lens is so wide that it doesn't even have a focus ring, everything from the front of the lens to infinity is in focus. We use this for our 16mm rig and the lens has a standard Arri mount. We use it on our Kodak K-100 wind-up camera when its in our water housing for for follow cam on the snow, in the halfpipe, etc and the K-100 is a C-mount like your beaulieu so we found an arri mount to c-mount adapter which works great. I also assume that you could fine these lenses with a c-mount already on it. Also, if you have a lens diameter that is 58mm or less, Century Precision Optics, Raynox, and Kenko all make wide angle lens adapters that will screw onto the front of the lens. The offer them from wide angle all the way to fisheye, (expensive but very cool).
Lucas Lightfeat
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Post by Lucas Lightfeat »

Also, wide-angle adapters, such as the Nizo UltraWide3 and Canon C-8 require you to place focus to infinity and use a camera with a macro setting, which is used to focus the camera.

Once focussed, everything from the surface of the lens to infinity is in focus. Nice!

These lenses make the effective focal length of the lens about 4 to 5.5mm - very wide indeed.

Lucas
Guest

wide angle and aesthetics of the time

Post by Guest »

Aesthetics have changed over time and nowadays the super wide angle look is stylish. Back in the 1970's, this wasn't so. Plus wide angle lenses on the super wide end weren't manufactured in large quatities so they were very expensive those days.

If your super8 camera has a 58mm diameter filter thread or smaller, you can buy a wide angle adapter made for video cameras. You'll just need to make sure your super8 camera has a macro focussing ability. Today's video cameras rarely have a larger than 58mm thread, so anything bigger like my Yashica 50XL's 62mm filter thread, well you're out of luck.

If you do have a 62 or 67mm filter thread lens, then you'll need to track down the Nizo Ultra Wide III or the Canon C-8 adapter. In terms of new, the only 62mm wide angle adapter is made by Olympus for their E10/E20 line of dig cameras, but it's only a 0.8x factor lens. The Nizo and Canons are around 0.6x or so.
jean
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Post by jean »

folks, thanks to all again for the information! I'm really happy to hear that I basically can get away with adapters made vor videocams, and will keep an eye on the cmounts in ebay.

thanks!
andy

Post by andy »

jean, what camera are you using??
if you purhase a c-mount lens ( if you are using a c-mount camera ) make sure you have the lens back focus adjusted to the camera, you wont get really sharp results if you dont, i
only saying this from experiance...also i am only assuming
that lenses made for video cams wont be the same optical quality as those made for film cameras...
jukkasil
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Post by jukkasil »

Here is one Angenieux wide angle lens (c-mount) at ebay.de:

http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vie ... gory=12896
Best Regards

Jukka Sillanpaa
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