Kodak Schneider-Kreuznach Xenar 0.7x Wide Angle Lens-LENS, 0.7X WIDE-ANGLE, 55MM, FOR DX

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be easily damaged.

Using large amounts of Zoom with this lens can produce some unexpected results. Depending on the camera, you may not be able to zoom in very much at all before odd things start to happen to the images. Make sure you play with it before doing anything important. Some effects may be interesting and useful.

Kodak Schneider-Kreuznach Xenar 0.7x Wide Angle Lens-LENS, 0.7X WIDE-ANGLE, 55MM, FOR DX

...

be easily damaged.



Using large amounts of Zoom with this lens can produce some unexpected results. Depending on the camera, you may not be able to zoom in very much at all before odd things start to happen to the images. Make sure you play with it before doing anything important. Some effects may be interesting and useful.

Kodak Schneider-Kreuznach Xenar 0.7x Wide Angle Lens-LENS, 0.7X WIDE-ANGLE, 55MM, FOR DX

...

you can ALSO use this lens with Panasonic FZ7, FZ8, FZ30 etc. Just buy the standard Panasonic 55mm lens adaptor. This is the same adaptor used for the 55mm ND filter and 55mm MC protector (not the plastic 52mm lens shade adaptor that comes with the camera). The Kodak Schneider-Kreuznach 0.7 wide angle converter is half the cost of the Panasonic version, and in my opinion much higher quality.

- The converter even works (and works incredibly well) on a Fuji S5200 camera. In fact this the only camera of those I have listed that does NOT need any 55mm adaptor, the Schneider 0.7 converter lens just screws right on, and fits like a glove.

Image detail is sharp down to the single pixel level from edge to edge (how much sharper does it need to be?).

Chromatic Aberration is well controlled, with only slight purple fringing showing up in ultra high contrast scenes like sunlight through trees.

There is a little barrel distortion, but it is relatively low for a wide-angle zoom lens.

Are there any negatives? Sure, nothing's perfect.

This lens sets in front of your main lens so any slight imperfections are magnified if you zoom with it in place; plus it was optimized for wide angle; so you should not expect to use much of the full 10:1 or 12:1 zoom range of your camera with the converter lens in place.

Technically this isn't really a big problem, because once you zoom up by about 1.5X you are back into your cameras main zoom range, and can just remove the converter to cover this range.

Note that the Panasonics FZ series Lumix cameras disable all zooming (and set to the camera to the maximum wide setting) as soon as you tell the camera that it is using a wide-angle-converter lens. The reason Panasonic gives for this is to insure optimum image quality. You could bypass this by not using the 'converter' menu setting on the FZ cameras, but then the image stabilization will not be recalibrated to allow for the 0.7 factor and will not work as well. Since this limitation still applies with the twice-as-expensive Panasonic version, the Kodak Schneider-Kreuznach version is still a bargain on this camera. (even as a fixed focal length wide angle)

Another issue is that the typical `super-zoom' camera (Kodak z710, Panasonic FZ7, or Fuji s5200), has a very complex zoom lens with a dozen or more optical elements, and with this add-on lens you are adding another 4 elements, so if you shoot towards the sun you have to be a little more careful about lens flare and reflections (sometimes they look really cool, but usually you are going to want to avoid them).

The quality of the multicoatings on the Schneider-Kreuznach Xenar 0.7x look about as good as any I have seen on any lens, so they did what they could to avoid these reflections, but they do show up under extremely bright contrasty conditions like shooting towards the sun (even without the converter lens, you can get some reflections under these conditions).

If you avoid these extreme situations, you will get perfectly clear images that look incredible, so I don't want to make this seem like more of an issue than it is, but it is something to consider so you won't be disappointed the first time you run into it.

If I had one wish-list item, it would be for someone to offer a custom four-lobe flower petal style wide-angle lens shade for this lens (or even better for Kodak to supply one with the lens).

For those that haven't read the other reviews, there is also a problem with this lens while using the camera's built in pop-up flash, because the Kodak Schneider-Kreuznach 0.7 converter lens is so large that it's front partially blocks the pop-up flash leaving a shadow in the image.

Since I mentioned a few other cameras that this converter lens can be used with, I thought that I had better also mention that even though the lens will indeed work very well with these other cameras (Fuji s5200, Panasonic FZ series), ALL of them will ALSO suffer from the same flash shadow issues.

One admittedly kludgy solution, is to rig a small piece of foil about 4 inches square in front of the camera's pop-up flash at a 45 degree angle, so the flash gets bounced up off the ceiling. It takes some tinkering to get this to work, and obviously the trick won't work outside or with a dark colored ceiling, but with a little fiddling, I found that by bouncing the flash off the ceiling, I could get around the dreaded lens shadow problem. You loose a lot of flash power, but at ISO 200 or 400 you can still light things up pretty well with this trick out to a distance of several feet.

For more flash range, there are fairly reasonably priced slave flashes you can use to add an external flash to a point and shoot type camera that does not have a hot-shoe (search Amazon for "Cameta Digital Slave Flash"). Be sure to check the specs of the flash you plan to buy to make sure it can properly slave trigger from the funny double flash that most digital cameras generate and can go nice and WIDE to cover this lens. Also, be aware that even a fairly powerful external flash may not completely drown out the shadow from the camera's pop-up flash (which unfortunately must still fire to trigger the slave). The solution to this, once again, is to rig a little piece of foil or something similar on the cameras pop-up flash to direct it upward or to the side, so it can still trigger the slave but won't add it's own partially shadowed contribution in the forward direction. I know this may be more bother than some are willing to go through, but using a powerful external flash in bounce mode gives much better flash pictures anyway, so this is a good option if you really need to take ultra wide flash shots with this lens.

Despite the lack of the lens shade, and the flash issues, I have really been pleased with this lens's overall performance, and can highly recommend it to anyone who would like nice wide angle performance.