This lens offers a fisheye view, 180 degree, with the Nikon DX format. This lens is equivalent to the 16mm fisheye lens on the FX format. The extreme wide angle format of this lens gives a unique aspect to wide angle photography. This fisheye lens is specially designed for the DX format. The lens gives good color saturation, contrast and excellent image sharpness.
This lens can be used in closed spaces to give a very wide perspective. Fisheye lenses can create major distortion to the straight lines in images, but this can generally be fixed in post processing software. Personally I am not very keen on fisheye lenses due to the distortion, I would prefer to stitch images together to get a super wide view, I prefer to obtain a wider angle by stitching several images from a lens with less distortion using Photoshop stitching or PTGui software. However, as I have commented, the distortion can be corrected to some extent in software, but there is some loss of coverage and also some loss of sharpness in the corners. This lens uses ED elements to give exceptional performance.
Fisheye lenses such as this need to be carefully used to avoid flare, however the performance of this lens is very good on the DX format.
Some users have been known to cut off the small built in lens hood with this lens to use it on the FX format cameras. If it is in its natural state on FX cameras it will vignette. With a modified 10.5 lens the picture angle is slightly larger than 200 degrees.
This lens has some problems with chronatic aberations, however with some post processing this can be reduced. Also software is available to defish the distortion of this lens if required.
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Specification are as follows:
- Lens Construction 10 elemments, 7 groups, 1 ED glass element,
- Picture Angle, DX format 180 degrees,
- F stop range 2.8 to 22,
- Closest focusing distance 0.14metres, 0.46 feet,
- Maximum reproduction ratio 0.2 times,
- Dimensions 63 x 62.5 mm,
- Weight 305 grams.