Pixco 8mm F3.8 Fish-eye CCTV Lens for C Mount Camera + 16mm C Mount Movie Lens to Sony E-Mount NEX Camera Lens Adapter

This Generic Fisheye 8mm F3.8 C-mount lens is a great buy for micro 4/3 cameras - optically nothing else comes close until you pay >£200. It is sold under many brand names or sometimes "No Name" at all. On an M4/3 camera it fills the sensor without vignetting. For this it scores 4 stars for me (not 5 because it is fiddly to use, distorts easily and the lens cap fits really badly and falls off all the time.But you get what you pay for as mechanically the build quality of this lens is very poor.....after 3 months of light use and storage in a secure camera bag the front half just fell off. It is held on only by tiny screws which protrude <1mm and come out despite careful handling leaving you with 2 halves of the lens - see my first photo. For this I give NO STARS. Hence my grudging 2 STARS rating overall.If you can keep it working without it coming apart- then the next step is to make it useful is correct it from a fisheye back to a "rectilinear" image with normal geometry (straight lines back to straight instead of curved). My 3 second fix is to use DXO-Pro image software, call up the EXIF controls, check "distortion", toggle "Correction = Manual" and "Type = fisheye", and for intensity" just type in the number 84. In 19 out of 20 images this is the only fix needed, See my second photo for this and some before and after shots. All the photos are full frame, with no cropping and straight out of the camera with the only editing being the DXO-Pro geometry correction.Shoot at about F5.6 to F8 whenever you can. Wider and the edge distortion is terrible. Smaller and there is a lot of diffraction (typical problem for digital sensors) which lowers the image quality. Buy a spirit level that slides into the camera flash hot shoe - because absolutely level images are needed to avoid inelegant distortions.If you buy one - I hope yours lasts longer than mine!!!!! On this experience I wouldn't repeat the buy - but since I liked the extra photo options the fisheye lens gave me I will save up for a higher build quality version in the future.

Here's the deal: this is a super cheap fish-eye lens that gives you that very wide angle effect - but the glass is simply inferior to the name brand stuff and it's not sharp enough for pro photos. But that's OK with me because I only payed around $70 for it. And now I know that I love wide-angle lenses and can invest in a better one!I've attached a few photos for reference. The first four of them have had been cropped to remove the vignetting which is so bad you can actually see the edge of the lens and the lens hood (which cannot be removed, I might cut it off). The last one shows this effect.I'm using a Sony NEX-6 camera body. The Sony NEX has a crop factor of 1.5x, so keep that in mind when reading this review. Micro 4/3s have a 2.0x crop factor, so you won't need to manually crop your images as much to remove the lens hood, if you have to crop them at all. In fact, I believe this lens was probably designed to work best with a 2.0x crop factor, and that's why you can see the edge of the lens and the lens hood in the photos.The lens is threaded for a C-mount and then comes with an adapter for the Sony E-mount. I'm pretty sure the exact same generic product is sold for Micro 4/3 but with a different adapter, and possibly the Nikon J1, etc. You could buy this lens and then whatever adapter you need to fit any camera. As far as the adapter goes: it's pretty bare bones but it does the job.One complaint: it's pretty difficult to adjust the aperture and focus because the knobs are so small. I usually decide what aperture I want based on the light available, put the camera in aperture priority mode so that it finds the right shutter speed for me, adjust the ISO until the shutter speed is at least 1/8 second or faster, and then I focus on the subject (using the peaking features on the sony nex-6 and looking through the digital viewfinder).Hope this helps!

Looking through the finder the image looks OK. I haven't downloaded an image to really inspect quality, just got it this morning. For this price it gets an image. What more can you ask.The one issue is that the built-in butterfly shade encroaches on the image. The two larger shade petals can be set to the bottom and top in landscape and because the image more than fills that narrower dimension they don't block any of the image, but on the longer dimension even the shorter petals impose on the image. I am thinking of using a Dremel to grind the shorter petals down. -- If I could remove the shade I would.It looks to be a fun cheap fisheye option and I am going to keep it.