Lumix G3 + Samyang 7.5mm

[hot]

 

[pellicle]

nice to see, both on the camera and what it produces. Thanks for posting.

 

[hot]

And it is much smaller and not so heavy like Samyang 8mm (for APS-C), which of course works also with Lumix G1/2/3/...

 

[Tullio]

Nice images. How come some pictures are very distorted while others the distortion is barely noticeable? Did you PP'ed them? If so, which S/W did you use?

 

[Vivek]

Tullio, Perspective distortion. Vastly exaggerated in case of a fisheye more than any other type of lens.

 

[Tullio]

Interesting...some images present very very little distortion making this lens usable as a SWA for landscape photography.

 

[httivals]

Tullio: when you have the camera perfectly level with the fisheye the distortion is very much controlled, depending on what may be in the foreground. This lens, and the panny 8mm fisheye which is even better, are both excellent. When used with the Hemi plug in for Photoshop which only partially defishes -- it makes vertical lines perfectly vertical; it's a spherical defishing, not a rectilinear one -- it produces an image very much like the old panoramic film cameras with a swinging lens (e.g., a Widelux). It's a good alternative to stitching multiple images for a panorama.

I had the Samyang for a few weeks and then tried the Panny. They are both great fisheyes, but the Panny has much better color and microcontrast, and is a bit sharper in the corners.

I also have the Panny 7-14mm, but I expect that I'll use the fisheye a lot too, maybe even more. When I want to use an ultrawide I often like doing panoramas and these fisheyes with the Hemi plug produce great images. You do not get a lot of smearing like you get with a rectilinear defishing program. And the fisheyes are a lot smaller than the Panny 7-14mm.

Using the GH2, I recently printed a few desfished images to 25" wide on my Epson 3800 and they're fantastic - as good as 24" prints I made on my original Canon 5D. I have over 10 years experience doing high quality digital printing so I'm fairly experienced out how to extract the most from an image in post.

You can get great large prints from the GH2 if you shoot at base iso of 160. It's still very good at higher isos, but if you want to print large, you should stick to the base iso as much as possible.

 

[hot]

All pictures are OUT OF CAMERA, no postprocessing ... only resized to 800x450

 

[Tullio]

Tullio: when you have the camera perfectly level with the fisheye the distortion is very much controlled, depending on what may be in the foreground. This lens, and the panny 8mm fisheye which is even better, are both excellent. When used with the Hemi plug in for Photoshop which only partially defishes -- it makes vertical lines perfectly vertical; it's a spherical defishing, not a rectilinear one -- it produces an image very much like the old panoramic film cameras with a swinging lens (e.g., a Widelux). It's a good alternative to stitching multiple images for a panorama.

I had the Samyang for a few weeks and then tried the Panny. They are both great fisheyes, but the Panny has much better color and microcontrast, and is a bit sharper in the corners.

I also have the Panny 7-14mm, but I expect that I'll use the fisheye a lot too, maybe even more. When I want to use an ultrawide I often like doing panoramas and these fisheyes with the Hemi plug produce great images. You do not get a lot of smearing like you get with a rectilinear defishing program. And the fisheyes are a lot smaller than the Panny 7-14mm.

Using the GH2, I recently printed a few desfished images to 25" wide on my Epson 3800 and they're fantastic - as good as 24" prints I made on my original Canon 5D. I have over 10 years experience doing high quality digital printing so I'm fairly experienced out how to extract the most from an image in post.

You can get great large prints from the GH2 if you shoot at base iso of 160. It's still very good at higher isos, but if you want to print large, you should stick to the base iso as much as possible.

Thanks very much for all the info. I think I'll be getting the Rokinon soon. I've seen nothing but good results and reviews and the price is much more attractive than the Lumix.

 

[jsnack]

I briefly had the Samyang 7.5, but I sent it back. I thought the handling was really poor. The focus was very stiff and hard to get your hand on unless you were looking at the camera.

The image quality was fine...no problems with that.

 

[Tullio]

In my experience, the stiffness of the focus ring is a hit and miss type of thing. You can have two exact identical lenses, one with a loose ring and one with a tighter ring. Most of the time the difference in tightness is not that obvious and since we don't usually have two identical lenses next to each other to make the comparison,we just assume that that's how it is. Then every now and then you come across the ones presenting more obvious problems.

 

[httivals]

I had no problems at all with the focus ring on the Rokinon 7.5mm that I tried.

 

[hot]

Lumix G3 + Samyang 7.5mm

 

[Tullio]

All very nice but I like the second best.

 

[henningw]

When used with the Hemi plug in for Photoshop which only partially defishes -- it makes vertical lines perfectly vertical; it's a spherical defishing, not a rectilinear one --

I think you mean that it defishes to a cylindrical projection, because it starts out as a certain form of spherical projection.

Henning