Best Features of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

We have done a number of tutorials lately so we thought it was time for another inexpensive product review. This time we go back to our friends at Gadget Infinity to review an unbelievably affordable wide angle lens. We ordered the one to fit the Olympus E-500 to see how it would fair in some real world tests.

This is definitly one of those times when we have bought something with extremely low expectations. We are talking about a wide angle lens system for $39 compared to a quality wide angle lens running for well over $500. At under fourty bucks, if it sucks, it goes into the circular filing cabinet.

The lens screws onto the end of your normal lens just like a filter does. The shorter the focal length, the more pronounced the wide angle effect is. One big downside is that the normal lens hood for our lens wont work with this lens and being a wide angle, it is even more prone to lens glare from peripheral light sources, so you have to be careful when shooting in certain places like outdoors.

When shooting at a very short focal length, you will get a signifigant amount of lens distortion, most of which can be corrected with most software tools such as Photoshop.

Where is really shines is in larger areas such as outdoor landscape shots. To give you an idea of what you can expect, here are two shots from a recent shoot showing a normal shot and a shot using the wide angle lens.

Normal View

Wide Angle View

You can see that with a shot like this you get quite a bit more of the scene into the image than without the wide angle lens.

Fisheye Effect
At closer distances, the wide angle lens will create a noticable fish-eye effect. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you are hoping for. The following images are of my car, the first using the wide angle lens from about 20 feet away and the second using the lens from about 5 feet away.

Distant Shot with Wide Angle Lens

Close up shot with wide angle lens

Vingetting Problem
Another problem is when you are zoomed all the way in, there is noticable vingetting that occurs which limits the size of the image that can be cropped. The following photo show an example of this problem.

Vingetting Problem

Summary
Is this lens every bit as good as a $500 lens? Of course not, and we certainly didn’t expect it to be. A more expensive lens wont suffer from as much distortion at the shorter focal lengths. Is it worth the $40 to have a simple wide angle conversion that will work in certain conditions? Yes, absolutely. While not perfect, it is far better than we expected. While not profesional quality, it certainly can fill the needs of many beginner DSLR users.

Features: 4
Quality: 3
Results: 2.5
Price: 5
Value: 5
Overall: 3.9

Web Site: Gadget Infinity