Review on 📹 Opteka OPT-SC37FE Platinum Series 0.3X HD Ultra Fisheye Lens for Digital Video Camcorders with 25mm, 30mm, 30.5mm & 37mm filter sizes by Gary Generale

I had high hopes for this lens. It's beautiful - lots of thick, heavy, multi-coated lenses - quite an impressive look and feel. It truly offers a 180 degree fisheye view. But that's where the good ends, at least with my camera. I mounted a Canon s95 with a 37mm adapter thread on the front. The S95 is a nice camera but it doesn't have the best macro in the world - I think its close focus is around 6cm which led to problem #1. When mounted directly to the camera with or without the included spacer ring, the camera will not be able to focus close enough for this lens to work. I have to hold the lens about 3 inches from the camera to get a sharp image. No problem, I thought when I recently bought a 37mm close-up filter set. It was either a 4x or 10x lens that I could screw onto the back to get a sharp image. Now I have a working fish eye! Wait - I can clearly see that the lens hood covers about 10-20% of the frame. So I removed it for a wider angle and full screen effect. Unfortunately the photo quality is really bad. The entire image is soft and the outer third of the image is really poor quality - lots of chromatic aberration and very little detail. Of course, I'm looking at the picture through a 10-megapixel camera. It's also possible that the close-up lens I paired with the fisheye degrades the image quality a bit, but I just don't think the fisheye has the resolution I need. I think that's why they sell it for digital camcorders - I'm assuming the HD resolution is equivalent to 1 megapixel image quality. So this isn't false advertising, just be aware that the image quality isn't good enough for most photo apps. I have a much cheaper semi fisheye optic that has much better image quality - basically it gives me the inner 2/3 of a full fisheye field of view, at about the same quality and less weight and price. So buy this for your camcorder and remember that you need a pretty good macro skill for this lens to work on its own, otherwise you'll need an additional lens.