James Miller reports on the Metabones Speed Booster – an optical reducer that reduces the projected image of a lens to counter the cropping of smaller sensors. The results are improved lighting performance, sharpness.
How is this possible?
I have no idea, but I think it might go something like this…
In essence, it’s an optical adapter that attaches to the E mount of a Sony NEX camera (Super 35 sensor) and then to a full frame SLR lens. The Metabones ‘Speed Booster’ is a 0.71 x focal reducer, that will effectively turn your full frame 50mm f/1.8 lens into a 35mm f/1.2 lens. Note, doing so (as a guide) will increase the aperture of that lens by one stop. Your Sony NEX Super 35 E-Mount will effectively have near full frame coverage on a full-frame lens. It also serves ‘double-duty’ as a lens mount adapter, from Canon EF lens (but not EF-S) to Sony NEX, with auto-aperture and image stabilisation.
It’s not just for really fast lenses – for example, a Canon 17mm f/4 TSE now becomes a 12mm f/2.8 ultra-wide tilt shift. I myself am still building a lens collection, and whilst the super fast Canons due to cost are not in my personal arsenal, my slightly slower Canons and Nikons have just been given a speed boost. That’s great news.
Here’s another article on the subject that may shed a little more light on how this works:
First understand that a lens simply projects an image over a flat surface. The image has a circular edge, we call it the image circle. The rectangular sensor sits inside that circle and then produces a digital image from the light falling on it.
So imagine a full frame sensor and the lens projecting a circle of light onto that box… The image is large enough to cover the full frame sensor. A smaller box inside that would not see the edges of the image circle or the full field of view.
So shrink the lens’s image down to APS-C sized and you have exactly the same field of view, same full frame image but cast over a smaller area.
How is that possible? The glass in the new Metabones EOS/E-mount Speed Booster adapter is an optical reducer. This glass is already common on some astro-telescope camera adapters to shrink the telescope’s image to fit a digital camera body.
The side affect of this is that it is actually brighter, like in the way a projection beam gets brighter as you move the projection lens closer to the wall. The image gets smaller and more concentrated.
I saw this the other day and think it’s an awesome tool, but only cost-effective to a certain point. It costs nearly as much as some budget DSLRs, so if you’re planning on owning something like the T4i, the Speed Booster may not be worth its price.
Except that the Speed Booster adapts Canon EF lenses to Sony NEX cameras. If someone was looking to upgrade from a T2i to a NEX 6, they could keep their lenses and improve on them.
True… Though I think we may start seeing this available for all kinds of mounts in the not too distant future.
They make five; not only Canon EF to Sony NEX but also ALPA and Lecia R to NEX and Fuji X.
My question, would this work with the VG range of cameras?
VG range? Do you have a model you’re thinking about?
Ideally, the full frame VG900 but the VG20 is a perfectly good camera. The VG series was Sony’s answer to DSLR filming, using their NEX mechanism and lens mounts in camcorders.
This will only work for cameras with smaller than full frame sensors because its essentially an optical reducer. It takes the lens which is designed to cover a full frame and reduces it to so it only covers an APS-C or MFT size sensor. So it won’t work on the VG900 camera but it will work on the VG20 and other NEX APS-C cameras.
BTW, the NEX designation is just for cameras that have the Sony E Mount. NEX just means “New E-mount eXperience” that’s all…