Wide Angle lenses

[Melissa]

I'm new to wide angle lenses and have gotten opposite answers to this question, hopefully someone here can help.

Q: Is a 0.45x wide angle lens better then a 0.5x wide angle lens?
(for Nikon 8700)

Thanks!

[dbevis]

Actually, the question is flawed. One is bound to be better than the other in certain circumstances. Thus, the conflicting answers.

There might be reasons (build quality, distortion, max. f/stop, etc.) that make one technically "better" but it boils down to what you need and how you intend to use it.

Presumably, you are about to make a purchase. What are you looking for from this investment?

Don

[Melissa]

I'm looking to get the widest angle for city pictures at night, would the .45x provide a wider angle than the .5x or vice versa?

[rjgleason]

Originally Posted by Melissa

I'm looking to get the widest angle for city pictures at night, would the .45x provide a wider angle than the .5x or vice versa?

Hold on Melissa I am checkinga few links and will get back to you. I don't have a Nikon 8700 but perhaps witha few clicks I can help.

Here's a starter:

The Nikon Coolpix 8700 supports a complete series of affordable accessory lenses, which expand the camera’s zoom range from 7mm-420mm. The Coolpix 8700 is compatible with Coolpix accessory lenses including the 1.5x ED glass teleconverter (TC-E15ED)(420mm), the 0.8x Wide Angle Adapter (WC-E80)(28mm) and the new Fisheye converter lens (FC-E9)(7mm).

[lecter]

Melissa, don't be scared to stitch, some of the best "wide angle" city shots are made from stitches and they don't have the CA issues or the distortion issues.

Rob

[rjgleason]

http://go.dc-accessories.com/int0-nikon.html

I'm not sure where you found the .45 or .5.....

[Melissa]

I found it on ebay in a lens kit, they sent me the .45x instead of the .5x wide angle advertised and when I called they said I didn't need to exchange because the .45x was better and since I don't want to be ripped off I had to make sure they weren't tricking me so I called the lens company and asked and they said the .45x has a wider angle and is better than the .5x.

Not bad they sent the wrong lens but it was a better one.

[Melissa]

Originally Posted by lecter

Melissa, don't be scared to stitch, some of the best "wide angle" city shots are made from stitches and they don't have the CA issues or the distortion issues.

Rob

What are stitches?

[dbevis]

You can take several images, offsetting the camera (rotating it on a tripod, usually), so that the right edge overlaps the left edge for adjacent shots.

With this, it's fairly easy to "stitch" then together and produce a wider shot than any single lens/image could give you.

There are various tools that automate the stitching, such as PanoTools and PhotoStitch.

Stitching is merely a term for overlapping and merging two or more images into one larger image.

I'd suspect the .45x lens might be more expensive than a .5x (probably bigger glass elements in it for a wider field of view), thus you may have gotten a good deal. On the other hand, the .5x might have been of better quality and thus you'd have been ripped off. Since the previous posters could not find the exact items you referenced, it's hard to say which way your purchase went.

Originally Posted by Melissa

What are stitches?

[jliechty]

Originally Posted by Melissa

What are stitches?

Stitching images involves taking multiple overlapping images and attaching them together in a (hopefully) seamless panorama. Or, you could take several rows of images that all overlap, and combine them into a more traditional rectangular image that has more resolution than any single image from your camera.

Photoshop CS comes with a plug-in to do this. There are also several simpler and less featured applications provided by some camera manufacturers, and some much better (but much more expensive) applications. There's also a free program that does this, but it's very hard to use (I've not tried it yet).

Edit: dbevis beat me to it, by two minutes!

[MatsP]

Originally Posted by Melissa

I'm new to wide angle lenses and have gotten opposite answers to this question, hopefully someone here can help.

Q: Is a 0.45x wide angle lens better then a 0.5x wide angle lens?
(for Nikon 8700)

Thanks!

If by "better" you mean gives a "wider angle", the 0.45x would be the choice, but it's only a little bit wider angle than the 0.5x.

The others discussed other aspects of "better", where the most important one would be "is it optically better", which is measured in several aspects:
- Distortion (straight lines aren't straight after going through the lens, or just blurry bits on the edges of the photo),
- Color Aberration. Light is made up by different colors, and a poor lens will have "rainbow effect" where the red may "bend" slightly less when passing through the lens than blue, making a white light on the edge of the photo look "multicoloured".

Better on the optical scene is obviously a lens with less distortion and color abberation.

Also, any lens that you attach to the front of another lens will loose light, which affects the F-stop (aperture) of the lens. This causes the camera to act as if it's got a smaller F-stop (bigger number, smaller aperture). Different types of attachment lenses affect this in with different amounts.

A better lens here is the one which takes away the least amount of light.

As others said, you can obviously create an illusion of a wide-angle lens by putting several pictures together in a photo-editor.

--
Mats

[Melissa]

Both lenses had the same specs, macro, high res day/night use, 52mm threaded lens, panoramic day/night vision.
The .45 was more expenssive as well according to manufacturer.

(ps. thanks for the notes I copy pasted for futur refference)