Showcase no-name 8mm F3.8 4/3” Fish-Eye lens

This micro 4/3 lens is available on ebay and amazon. Sometimes you will see it with “Fotasy” printed on the lens, sometimes without. The MFT mount is built in. Measurements on my lens: 107 grams, 63mm wide at lens hood, 38mm long.

It can be found on ebay and amazon for around $70.00. Below is a link to a photo of the lens on my GM5.

Show us what your adapted lens looks like on your camera

— Edit September 2016 - Here are lens profiles I use in Lightroom to de-fish my images. These are a modified version of some Rokinon 7.5 profiles. I discuss these in a later post in this thread.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8zQMOs6acYVVEpCZFFJOU5DZHM

— end edit

The photos below were shot RAW, with a fair amount of post processing. This is my second day with the lens, and it was raining yesterday.

The first one is not cropped. It represents the full width and height this lens is capable of.



The images de-fish well, I think.



I could have dialed in some vertical correction below, but I like the look as is.



Below is direct sunlight in a very mildly cropped image. In general I didn’t have a lot of problems with flare today. However, CA and fringing definitely exist - most images needed correcting for CA in Lightroom, and many needed fringing correction as well.

 

38mm long, 63mm wide at the lens hood. A lot smaller at the camera mount. I saw something on the web saying the weight was 160 grams, but that is not right - it's 107.

I think the images are a step up from the Olympus 9mm Body Cap Lens, which I own as well.

 

On Ebay, search for 8mm lens and sort by price. They start showing up at $65.00 or so and continue to around $70.00.

I don't own the Samyang 7.5 or the Panasonic 8mm. I have seen a lot of sample images of both lenses though. This no-name lens is much closer in image quality to those two than to images from the Olympus 9mm Body Cap Lens, which I do own. I can post some RAW images from this lens for download sometime if people are that interested.

 

User KenW posted some Lightroom and ACR lens profiles for de-fishing the Rokinon 7.5mm. They actually work pretty well with this lens.

Rokinon/Samyang 7.5 Lens Profiles: Micro Four Thirds Talk Forum: Digital Photography Review

Here are a couple of images using the Stereographic lens profile.





All in all, after a few weeks of use, I think the image quality is quite a bit better than the Olympus 9mm Body Cap Lens, which is slightly more expensive. This lens also gives you a much wider field of view than the Olympus 9mm BCL. The Olympus 9mm is listed as 140 degrees, and this lens seems like a typical 180 degree fisheye.

If you already have a Rokinon 7.5mm, you are not missing anything if you pass up this lens. If you don’t have a fisheye and want to start with something that’s better then the Body Cap Lens but not as expensive and heavy as the Rokinon/Samyang, this lens is worth considering.

There are two things about this lens that were disappointing to me. First, the vinyl bag it came with smells very bad, like a burning oil refinery. Second, sometimes there is fuzz at the edge of the image, starting at a corner and running down the short side of the image. I returned my first lens because of this and ordered from a different supplier. Both lenses show the problem, but it’s not nearly as bad on my second lens. Cropping 5 or 10 pixels from the short side of the image gets rid of the fuzz.

 

The lens hood is not removable. I have seen two C mount lenses that look a lot like this one. One has two "petals" on the end, the other has none - as in the other showcase. This lens has 4 petals, and is not C mount, it is micro 4/3. I don't know if all three lenses are the same, but I suspect they are very similar.

I have worked these images over in Lightroom, removing a lot of the fringing and chromatic aberration. Also I try to use F8 - that seems to be the sweet spot. In other words, I could easily produce images that look a lot worse with this lens by going to JPEG and F3.8.

 

I found some outstanding fringing on some of my photos yesterday. i am sharing one for those who are curious about just how bad this lens can be. Note that this is shot at F8, so there is potential for poorer image quality at larger apertures.

First, the "after" photo:



And now, a full size corner crop of the RAW file with no corrections for fringing or CA.

 

User shesmu posted a thoughtful and informative mini review of this lens here:

8mm f3.8 CCTV Fisheye mini review and samples

Here are two more photos, which may have been posted in other threads on this forum.

 

So true!

Your photos reminded me of a documentary I saw on photographers. It showed a Magnum photographer, a British guy, in a supermarket in the USA. I had to look up the name just now - it's Martin Parr.

Magnum Photos

Also, I want to let everyone who has this lens know that they are welcome to post in this thread. That's what it's here for.

 

I find de-fishing with lens profiles in Lightroom will pull the fingers out of my photos. Earlier in this thread I linked to a post with several RAW lens profiles created by a user here and posted on dpreview forums. Another user here added JPEG lens profiles to the original RAW ones.

Quick Lightroom De-fishing Tip for Samyang / Rokinon 7.5mm Fisheye Users

These profiles should work in Camera Raw as well.