2009-05-30T21:00:00
Rated 5 out of 5
A Pleasant Surprise
My Panasonic GS300 suffers from not having a very wide field of view at full wide. Since I shoot family scenes indoors as well as landscape shots outdoors, this limitation is a little frustrating. Given the large number of wide angle aux-lenses available and lack of many good sources for reviews and recommendations, I was hesistant to spend much money on one. I opted for the Raynox QC505 since it was at the lower end of the cost range and appeared to be a simpler device. Simpler is not always better, but extra layers of glass always reduce light transmission and multpile layers of poor glass will result in bad image quality. I have found out that cheap wide angle aux-lenses for my still camera produce very blurry images away from the center even though they seem substantial and contain a number of optical elements.
I tested the QC505 indoors and walking around my house in the yard. The results were surprisingly good! I then took it with me day-hiking and shot scenes in mixed lighting having sun filtering through overhead forest. I shot waterfalls and also took some footage while walking. At a number of points, I shot footage, then removed the QC505 "on the fly" - something you can't do with a screw-on type aux-lens - and later compared the before and after images.
Overall, I am pleasantly surprised with the QC505's performance. The field of view is widened significantly, but probably not quite the amount implied by the "0.5x" advertised - more like 0.66 I would estimate. That's OK since going much wider would lead to barrel distortion unless the lens was much more complex. I had to resist the temptation to zoom with the QC505 on the camera - it does not do well except at the widest zoom setting (though I did not try it in earnest). This lens is for shooting wide angle, not for zooming in. If one wishes to zoom in, they can reach right up and pop it off the front of the camera while rolling then zoom normally.
Color and exposure were both pretty good with the QC505 in place. I notice a very slight loss in color vividness and perhaps a little darkening in corners. The sharpness of the video is slightly less with it on, but playback on a 37" screen seemed quite acceptable. I knew going in that claims such as "digital ready" and "high definition" were meaningless for this sort of lens. Extra glass in front of the camera lens, especially inexpensive glass, cannot help but reduce resolution a little. Still, I will not hesitate to use the QC505 on my upcoming visit to Yellowstone NP to capture panaoramic shots of guysers, pools etc.. Another nice result of using it (perhaps any wide aux-lens) is that when you shoot while walking the video is less shaky. This is the result of the wider angle, of course, but I was fairly happy with my "walking video". This will be important to me in a future trip I am planning to hike through narrow canyons in Utah. A previous trip without the QC505 yielded good video that would have been much better with the wide capability. Finally, I noticed that whenever sunlight hit the lens, whether from the fron or side, a number of ghosts would appear. This happenes even without the QC505 in place, but I think the problem was a little worse with it on. No real surprise there - this is common to all but the most expensive wide angle optics.
To conclude, the QC505 does well what it is supposed to. I suspect that professional videographers would be caught dead using it, but they have much more expensive equipment than average Joe and need their footage to be of superior quality. I just need reasonable quality, and the QC505 delivers it at a very low price. Now, if I could only find something equivalent for my still camera....
Brian H.
