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Review Summary
2013-09-30T21:00:00
This one piece of equipment allows me to use my full collection of Canon lenses with my NEX 7, as well as a few old favorite Nikon primes that I had already adapted to Canon mounts. It's like getting a dozen lenses for the price of one. In the photography that I do, it's more useful to maintain the wide angle nature of a lens than to boost the telephoto aspect of a lens with conversion factor. Speed boost is a welcome bonus to the package, for limited lighting conditions and for making that shallow depth of field/focus effect even more accessible. I wish it were lighter, but it is very well constructed and shorter than the non-speed boost converter.
ROBERT S.
Both lens and camera mount ends: brass and plated with chromium
EF lenses
EF-S lenses
Image stabilization (IS)
Electronic manual focusing
EXIF (focal length, aperture, zoom range)
P, A, S, M exposure modes
Autofocus
Distance and zoom display on VG and FS series camcorders
Auto magnify
Contax N mount lenses modified to Canon EF by Conurus
Contax 645 NAM-1 adapter modified to Canon EF by Conurus
Sigma, Tamron and Tokina lenses in Canon EF mount
Metabones Speed Booster mounts between a mirrorless camera and a SLR lens. It increases maximum aperture by 1 stop (hence its name), increases MTF and has a focal length multiplier of 0.71x. For example, the Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II lens becomes a 59mm f/0.9 lens on a Sony NEX camera, with increased sharpness. The faster F-stop allows for shallow depth-of-field and a lower ISO setting for decreased noise.
Speed Booster is also particularly pertinent to ultra-wide-angle SLR lenses. The combined focal length multiplier of Speed Booster and an APS-C mirrorless camera is approximately 1.09x, making the combination almost "full-frame". Full-frame ultra-wide-angle SLR lenses largely retain their angle-of-view on an APS-C mirrorless camera when Speed Booster is used.
The optics of Speed Booster is designed by Brian Caldwell, PhD, a veteran of highly-corrected lens designs such as the Coastal Optics 60mm f/4 UV-VIS-IR APO Macro lens with exemplary MTF performance (focusing done with visible light requires no correction whatsoever for the full spectrum from UV to IR).
Speed Booster serves double-duty as a lens mount adapter, from Canon EF lens (but not EF-S) to Sony NEX, with auto-aperture, image stablization, EXIF and (slow) autofocus support for late-model (post-2006) Canon-brand lenses.