Can anyone point me towards a budget friendly wide angle lens? Maybe like a 12mm or something around there? I was looking at the oly 9-18mm, but that's out of my price range at the moment. Thanks! -seb
The cheapest in the 12mm range would be the Panasonic 14mm lens with the Panasonic wide angle adapter. It will make it an 11mm lens. There a several threads about it already. Also there are many threads asking your same question, but preferring wider. You really should have searched the forums first.
Maybe one of the manual Fisheye lenses is an option for you. De-fished in software, you are still looking at a 8-10mm picture. An alternative would be to look for a used 9-18mm.
The cheapest way to get to 12mm is a secondhand 12-50mm for <$200. The Panasonic 14/2.5 and DMW-GWC1 wide angle converter (~$250 secondhand) give you a bit wider (almost 11mm) but the sharpness isn't that great and the distortion can be annoying. A significantly larger but better combination is the Olympus ZD 9-18/4.0-5.6 4/3 version. It is a better lens than the m4/3 version and secondhand can be had for $350 or so, plus $50 for a 4/3-to-m4/3 adapter. The m4/3 version occasionally appears for a similar price.
Nothing on the budget side. You might consider a converter lens if you have a 14-42 zoom. Olympus makes the WCON-PO1 for their zooms, and Panasonic has the DMW-GWC1 for their H-PS14042 zoom and 14mm prime. I use the DMW-GWC1 on the 14mm and am happy with the resulting 11mm results, There are third party converter lenses for a lot less money, with probably a lot less quality. I found an old .45X converter lens from my Camcorder. It's very heavy though and would only work on lenses that don't rotate the filter threads. Can't use it on my 20mm for example, but I see it fits on my 14mm, so I'll give it a test soon. I do not see the merits of defishing my Rokinon 7.5. First, it helps to frame the shot with this purpose in mind. Next, I think it's a lot of work to use the (free) hugin software, Instead, I would suggest making panoramas with hugin, which is easier. If you don't get too aggressive, maybe a two image merge with a 25% overlap, the software matches the images quite well. This is a a free solution while you save up for a WA lens.
