Cheap vs. Expensive Speed Booster / Focal Reducer test... For Science! (Not actually for science.)

This one's for all our Photography Nerd readers. Or, rather, it will be once we get some.



WHY THIS TEST? (A little geekdom here, but not too much.)

I recently found out that Fujifilm (maker of cameras and film stock from Way Back) cameras have, in their firmware, "film emulation" presets. Unlike the silly generic filters that most cameras have in them, the Fuji mimics, as close as you can hope for, the look of Fuji's famously beautiful film stocks, as well as others by Kodak, etc. So, there are film presets like Velvia, Portra, Kodachrome, and many others. Since playing around with vintage lenses is very much a thing of mine, this discovery was one which made my eyebrows do an excited little dance. Fast forward a week or so, and I became the new owner of a used Fujifilm X-T10: a camera from about five years ago, making it positively ancient in digital camera years. As a result, it was pretty damn cheap.

Now, most old lenses are meant for shooting on a 35mm camera. Trouble is, not all current cameras have an image sensor (the digital bit that does the job that film used to do) that's the same size as a 35mm film negative. The Fuji camera I just picked up has a sensor 25% smaller than the image that an old lens projects onto it. So as a result, the outer edges of the image falls off the edge of the camera's sensor and isn't captured. The lens will still work on the camera, but the image will be a little more "zoomed in" than it should be, and also, you lose some brightness, since not all of the light is hitting the image sensor. In general, this whole situation is called "crop factor".

For more detailed explanation, your browser will more or less explode with pedantic photography enthusiast opinions when you search on "camera crop factor". Enjoy

A cropped image isn't ideal, because, with vintage lenses, lots of the interesting stuff you get comes from the edge of the lens. Some lenses have darker edges (vignette), and lots of old lenses, in the out of focus areas, don't just blur the image, they smear or swirl the image in crazy ways (swirly bokeh). Yes, technically, these are flaws. But, in the age when your average smartphone can capture bright, sharp, accurate images with impressive fidelity, the weirdness of old lenses deliver personality and charm. This is where the fascination comes in. So, losing the edges of the lens' image loses part of the fun.

To remedy the problem of  cropped images when adapting old lenses to non-full-frame (or "cropped sensor) cameras, there are things called "speed booster / focal reducers". Any vintage lens is going to need an adapter just to be mounted on the modern camera body, but a speed booster is an adapter that also has in it a corrective lens that focuses the incoming image down to fit better onto the image sensor. This not only has the effect of making the picture look more like it should. It also makes the image brighter, since much less light is being thrown away. On average, a focal reducing adapter like this will add a full stop of extra light to the image.

A company called Metabones basically invented focal reducing lens adapters, and as of this writing, theirs are still unquestionably the best. If you're putting yet another glass element between the lens and your camera, you want it to be as well made as you can afford, so it only helps - and does no harm to -  the resulting image. There are now many MANY cheap knockoff speed boosters, mostly made in China, which cost less than 1/6 of what you'd pay for a Metabones model. Are they all junk? How close can you get to the performance of the original Metabones for a fraction of the money? Good question.

IT'S A WHAT, THEN?

The generic term for these devices is "speed booster / focal reducer / lens adapter". The "speed booster" term comes from the fact that you're getting more light on the sensor and can then use a faster shutter speed. Blah blah blah. Anyway, this generic term is a mouthful, so when someone says "speed booster", they're talking about these devices and don't want to use the whole phrase, maybe because they have to work in the morning.

SHAMEFUL SHOPPING

Shortly after buying the Fuji camera, I went on Ebay and bought a Chinese speed booster. The listing didn't mention the brand at all. So, consider it generic. It cost $70.

After a few days, temptation got the better of me and I bought a Metabones speed booster. It cost $450. Ow. That's much more than I paid for the camera it's meant to work with. But, I've had one for my Olympus camera for years, and I knew their stuff to be built to a very high standard with state of the art glass in it. It's definitely a price that's hard to overlook, but with fifty-ish old lenses that will work better in its company, I found a way to justify the expense.

All of my old lenses are adapted to the ubiquitous Canon FD lens mount. I have Nikons, Canons, Asahis, Mirs, Meyer-Gorlitzes, Helioses... and they all have little adapters on them to convert them to the Canon FD bayonet mount, just because it was so common. So, both of the adapters I bought convert Canon FD to Fuji X mount.

This picture may help make it clear what the speed booster / lens adapter / focal reducer is doing.


From left to right: Early 1970s Asahi-Pentax Super Takumar Lens (with a thin little Canon FD adapter stuck on it), Metabones speed booster adapter thing / camera body.

THE CONTENDERS

Disclaimer: I didn't get these for free. I spent my own hard-earned Big American Bucks on them.

On the left is the Metabones ($450). On the right is the Pixco ($70). Oh, by the way, the previously anonymous Chinese speed booster turns out to be a "Pixco" branded unit. The Ebay seller might want to mention that in their listing. Anything to help it seem less like a fly-by-night Ebay scam.

Interestingly, the lens in the Metabones adapter is a little larger in diameter. Also notice that the Chinese version only has three screws holding it together, while the Metabones has five. This kind of stuff can be found throughout a casual examination of both units. Unsurprisingly, the Metabones weighs a little more than the Pixco.

PEEPING THE PIXELS

The test image I used is a huge framed poster of 8 bit pixel art. It has lots of color and detail, so it seemed like a good choice. If you're looking for laboratory conditions and stuff, you might want to head over to DPReview.com, because you ain't getting that here. Sorry not sorry.

Both sets of test images were taken using the same Super Takumar lens with the aperture wide open at f/1.8. Don't forget that it's a manual lens, which means that both images were focused manually by yours truly, which introduces an unavoidable margin of error.

This image will open at 1600px wide if you click on it.

Blah blah image 1600px click, etc.

For seventy dollars, the Pixco is not bad! Colors are pretty much the same as those produced by the Metabones, and sharpness is roughly equivalent... in the center, at least. To flip between them, try opening each in a new browser tab.

Here's a 2-up shot of the above images...

Click blah 1600 bigger, blah.

Click big etc. etc. etc.

This image (above) is a 100% crop of the center of each image. So, one photo pixel is one image pixel on your screen.

The Pixco is still not bad for seventy bucks. The Metabones has just slightly more contrast. So, maybe the Pixco has just a tiny bit of haze in the glass. Look at the black outlines on the soldiers to see this. But still, that's splitting hairs.

At the edges is where the differences become much more obvious. This is the upper left corner of the image. The Pixco loses a lot of contrast and clarity at the edges. This is where the extra $380 dollars went. Sure, the Metabones is better, but is it 600% better?

CONCLUSION

The Cheapco Pixco does a fine job for $70! (Well, the copy I received, at least). Thankfully, there are obvious differences in the Metabones image, so I don't feel like a sucker for spending the money on it. But a side by side comparison like this is something that I would have liked to see before I spent the money, purely in the interest of making an informed decision.

The Pixco is definitely softer at the edges. But really, is this a deal breaker - especially for someone interested in using the adapter purely with vintage lenses, which generally feature "quirky shenanigans" at the edge of the image anyway? I mean, I don't feel any buyer's remorse about the Metabones, partly because it's a beautifully made bit of gear, and I like that any personality in the resulting images will come from the old lens, and not from a lens adapter engineered down to a price point. But if I was, say, a college student who couldn't justify over four times the price, the Pixco is a more than acceptable option.

One thing to consider, though, is this: With a major company like Metabones, you can pretty much count on consistent quality from one example to the next. When buying  a no-name brand with a name you've never heard of from an anonymous factory, personal experience has shown that every purchase is a roll of the dice. Part of what you're paying for when you buy a known product from a company with a reputation to protect is not just the quality of the product, but the consistency of that quality between examples. In the case of this Pixco, maybe I just got a lucky copy that more or less works as it should?

Thanks for reading!

Nikon F - Still purdy... and so can you!

This ad comes to us from a 1966 ad in LIFE magazine. That was a special "photography issue", with a story on human vision, and how the photographic process works (or worked), and a big section in the middle with a load of photos from around the world. So, it made perfect sense for Nikon to buy a full page ad in that issue.

Nikon had nothing to prove, so they went for the soft sell, all confident and "Check us out. We're Nikon, man." And why not? They were, and are, pretty much the top of the heap.

Image pulled from KenRockwell.com

Hey, that lens looks familiar. Why, that's my 1966 Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 stuck on the front of that beautiful, formerly great, unfortuante, obsolete camera, in its native habitat, as it were. Back in October when we did the "Three Fast Fifties" comparison, I really blew it for the Nikon, by using it on the amazingly shitty Fotodiox fuzzbox "corrective adapter". Yes, we ran an update to that post when I realized that all the mush was coming from the adapter and not the lens itself, but that post only had one little demonstration image to show how the Fotodiox adapter ruined all images that passed through it. The lens never really got a fair shake. So, on this, the day of the Nikon ad, why not let the '66 Nikon show off a little? Poor thing. Its gigantic f/1.4 aperture lets in lots of light, which makes it really nice for low light situations, and the hefty build quality feels mighty nice in your hand. Mine is almost fifty years old and everything still feels like butter.

Why?

Old lenses aren't necessarily worse than new ones. In the last fifty years, we haven't goteen better at grinding glass. We've just gotten better at making electronics. So, a current lens will have auto focus and image stabilization and things like that. But, if you don't mind focusing and aperturing for yourself - or, weirder still, if you LIKE doing those things manually - vintage lenses are a very cheap way to get some very high quality glass in your collection. Plus, an old lens like this one will be made from aluminum and chrome plated brass, while only some modern premium lenses are built this way. Lastly, using manual lenses give you a firmer grounding in the fundamentals of photography, so at the very least they're a worthy exercise.

How?

You can pick up a copy of this Nikon for yourself on Ebay for maybe as low as fifty or sixty dollars if you're quick with the bid button. If you do an Ebay search on "Nikkor 50mm 1.4", you'll cast a wide net that will drag back lots of lenses that aren't the exact model in this ad, or nearly as old. Look for the big, scalloped focus ring and the matte silver trim ring on the end, and you can be confident you have an example from somewhere in The Sixties.

Nikon hasn't changed their "F" lens mount since it was introduced in 1959, so if you have a Nikon DSLR, this lens will fit directly to your camera. Everybody else will need some kind of adapter.

Huh?

You can either get an inexpensive adapter that just converts one lens mount to another, or go the more exciting / expensive route and get an "active" adapter that has corrective optics in it to make sure the image is the right size when it hits your sensor. Here's a brief explanation. For more detail, please see The Rest Of The Internet.

Different camera types can have different size sensors, with "full frame" cameras having a sensor the same size as a frame of 35mm film. Other non-full-frame cameras usually have sensors smaller than that, but some (really nice, really expensive) ones have sensors larger than 35mm film, called "medium format". The cameras with smaller-then-full-frame sensors are called "crop sensors", and there are many different sizes. If you have an Interchangable Lens Camera, you probably know whiat size your sensor is.

Imagine the camera's sensor being like a movie screen in a theater, and the projected movie is the image coming in through the camera's lens. If the lens was meant for a larger sensor (screen), the image will go off the sides of the sensor, and you'll be photographing through just the center of the lens. If the lens was meant for a sensor smaller than yours, your image will be like a circular window in a rectangle of black.

A simple adapter only concerns itself with mounting the foreign lens onto your camera body, and at the proper distance from the sensor. These are about $20. A "speed booster / focal reducer" will not only do that, but will also "refocus" the incoming image so that it falls on the sensor at a size equivalent to the way it worked on the camera it was made for. These range from $100 for a Chinese unit bought on Ebay (with which I've had good luck. I have one that's way better than the Fotodiox), all the way up to roughly $400 for a Metabones Speed Booster, which, I believe, is the company that invented them.

They're called "speed boosters" because, when the full image is matched to the size of your sensor, it's recieving more light. This is like getting an additional f stop of aperture out of the lens. So, if the maximum aperture on the lens is f/1.4, that's really 1.2, or very close to it. At f/5.6, you're probably getting f/4 or something. This means you can use faster shutter speeds, which means you get less motion blur, and better pictures in low light without resorting to using a flash. I hate flash, so this is great news.

Anyway...

And, now, with apologies to the NIkon 50mm 1.4, here are the photos it deserved three months ago. All were taken with an expensive-but-worth-it Metabones Canon FD to Micro Four Thirds Speed Booster and an inexpensive Nikon to Canon FD adpater, to get it on the Metabones. Believe it or not, you can stack adapters and they'll work just fine. Also, these shots were all taken without a tripod, which is one of those things you can do with a lens this fast. Hand held shots in low light aren't too much of a problem. Just hold your breath and keep your elbows against your ribs and you should be fine.

None of these had any post-processing to speak of. A few were cropped for different framing, but that's about it.Click any one for a bigger version.

With the aperture wide open at 1.4, it's still very sharp, as long as you keep Fotodiox's adapter far away from your camera. This would have been a fine opportunity to throw the thing into the river, but it was in a box at home.

This is a larger-than-100% crop of one of those lights in the above photo. I think it's pretty sharp for a night shot at that distance.

Will it bokeh? Sure will. These are some Pointy Tree Day lights in a dark room. Bokeh balls are creamy and round at the center, and orbital almond shapes toward the edges.

This picture was taken using a Polaroid 10x close-up adapter screwed on the end of the Nikon. With that in place, focus distance is about three inches.

Tea complete. Level finish!

Nixie tubes beg for a macro shot, with their many layers of electrodes.

A nixie tube light lying on the face of a spart phone. 10x close-up adapter in place. Nice colors.

The native minmum focusing distance of the Nikon is 7.5 inches. Colors are realistic and not at all muted. It's still a 50mm, so depth of field is very shallow at max aperture. That might be a problem if I didn't like the effect so much. Or, just stop down to F5 and adjust exposure compensation, blah blah blah.

This is the "separation of subject matter from background" that makes people love the 50mm focal length.