john_young5

I agree with Al, the Lens Pen works very well on all types of lenses. No liquid involved, a half twist of the cap readys the cleaning tip for the next smudge. It has a very soft retractable brush on one end to remove any particulate prior to wiping the lense with the dry contoured cleaning tip. And yes, it completely removes oily smudges with very little effort. There is also a mini-version if the lens pen for cleaning the smaller lenses. By the way, these lens pens are very popular with bird watchers for cleaning their lenses because of their convenience and the fact that if used properly, they will not damage the coating on lenses in the least.

Thanks Douglas,

I guess if .7x is the widest I can go then, that is better than nothing. The reason I was looking for the wider lens is that I,ve been doing some shooting in Yellowstone Park and with many of those shots I am constrained to the limits of a boardwalk. Unfortunately, the C-4000 lacks a bit in the wide angle department and so it is impossible to fit many of the shots into the frame. The .7x lense would help on some those shots but will not be wide enough on others. Oh well, I thought maybe someone had successfully incorporated a bit wider and better quality converter lense on the C-4000 with acceptable results. As to the cheap .5x lenses I've tried, both the Opteka and the Taconic brands (which are knock-offs of each other) suffer perceptible blurring and dreadful color distortion out from the center of the image. Bending of the image toward the edges of the frame with these lenses is actually not bad at all. For example, I shot a test photo with a light pole running up one side of the frame and the corner of a building running up the other side. The camera was held level on a tripod. Both sides of the image looked fairly straight and parallel, but the color separation/smearing and the increasing blur out from the center of the photo made these lenses unuseable, at least on the C-4000. Douglas, thanks for the input. I guess maybe I'm just out of luck going wider than .7x.

 

John Young

I am looking for a fairly good quality .5x wide angle lens for my

Olympus C-4000 camera. All I seem to be able to find is either the

off brand trash lenses (like shooting through a prism), or

Olympus's .7x wide angle lens which isn't as wide as I'd like. The

attachment threads are 52mm for my camera. Anyone have any helpful

suggestions?

 

Thanks

Yup, I recieved what was to be a Digital Optics brand .5x Wide angle lens, this time from e-pixphoto of New York City, and they switched the brand they shipped me to Taconic. This lense is exactly the same in every respect except color to the .5x Opteka wide angle hemispheric prism... er lens that 47St. Photo is peddling on ebay. Don't waste your money, these off brand wide angle lenses in the $50.00 range are very low quality, and even though they are being touted as "Fully Multi-Coated, Every Element" they are really just fully coated lenses, meaning of course that 1 or more of the lenses is fully coated with something. These guys are basically just peddling trash lenses in this price range. The photos you get after shooting through these lenses are so blurred out from the center and smeared with diverged colors that you'd be as well off shooting your photos through the bottom of a beer glass, really!

My experience with the .5x Opteka lens sold by 47St.Photo on a C-4000 Zoom Olympus is that the color aberration and lack of sharpness out from the center of the lens is so bad as to make the lense totally useless to me. It's like shooting through a hemispheric prism. I have a Digital Optics brand comming and I will post the results once I try it. I suspect maybe these off brand lenses in the same price range all have the same Japanese manufacturer.