2005-Jun-07
by Jens Birch

How the Peleng 8 mm fisheye performs on an E-1

Upon request from several 4/3:rd users, I have made this little article about the Peleng 8 mm f/3.5 fisheye used with the E-1.

Buying the lens
I bought my lens with an OM-mount fitted directly from "East Wave Products". Apparently they are located in Canada, but the lenses are manufactured in Belarus (a former Soviet republic) and are shipped from Minsk, the capital of Belarus. I got it for $215+$10 for S&H (insured post).

At East Wave Products, I was in contact with the "Sales manager" Dzmitry (support@eastwave.ca) who always answered all my mails promptly.

After the PayPal payment went through, it took less than a week to recieve the lens neatly packed in a sealed plastic container wrapped in an old-fashioned way with a lace-tied single sheeth of grey paper without a single piece of scotch. Very impressive!

First impressions
The lens is of decent quality and, IMO, is better than the price would indicate.
Here is one of the first pictures I took with it:



You see the entire image captured with the E-1 here. The aperture was set to f/5.6, the focus set to the hyperfocal distance 0.8 meters, and the camera was set to Aperture priority mode (which yielded 1/4000 sec exposure time). The black spots are dirt falling from the tyres and the blotch on the woman's cheek is from a drop of water on the lens. (It was raining at the time and the protruding lens element is virtually impossible to protect.)

I can only compare to the Raynox range of wide-angle converter lenses for cameras like the C5050 (which I have), and it is clearly better. I found that the lens is very soft and not at all useful at f/3.5 but already at f/5.6 it becomes decently sharp.

[NOTE added on July29 2005] I have used this lens a bit more now and I discovered a serious problem with using the OM-adapter with such short focal lengths. The OM-adapter is 0.1 mm thinner than the ideal thickness required to produce the infinity focus setting of an OM-lens at the actual infinity mark. With lenses of 'ordinary' focal lengths where the lens package moves several millimeters, that is not critically important. However with an 8 mm lens, the lens package moves only about 0.1 mm when focussing from 0.3 meters to infinity, hence making it impossible to trust the focus scale. I think this is the reason why the lens rendered unsharp images at f/3.5 in my initial tests since I did not focus with the viewfinder but rather by setting the hyperfocal distance on the distance scale of the lens. I will make some more tests soon to 100% confirm this.

Fortunately, the 4/3 sensor cuts away all the black circular edges and most of the 'outer rim'-part of the lens which means that it isn't a circular fisheye but also that what remains is pretty useful.

Contrary to rumors, spread via people who have not tried this lens themselves, the rear lens does NOT protrude at all beyond the OM-4/3 adapter. In fact, the back of the rear lens element is recessed about 3 mm from the mounting flange. So, there is no risk whatsoever that the mirror will hit the lens when used with a 4/3-standard camera. It is perfectly safe to use.

Sample images (all with aperture f/5.6)
In the image below, I have shown how the field of view of the 8 mm Peleng fisheye (right) compares to the Digital Zuiko 14-54 mm zoom set at 14 mm (left). (For those of you who likes numbers; I measured the horizontal field-of-view of the DZ at 14 mm to 65° and of the Peleng 8mm to 125° while the diagonal FOV of the Peleng was measured to >165°.) 100% crops from the red squares are shown below each image.



As you can see, it is pretty OK in the center but not so good at the edge. For the price, I find it still extremely good, and for many types of shots like snowboarding, skateboarding, etc. it will give me a lot of fun.

In the next panel of images, you see somehow how internal reflections will create glare in the image.


The bottom image is taken with the sun rays hitting the front element from high in the sky. No glare except for two small circular spots can be seen.
The middle image shows very strong coloured internal reflections that appeared when I raised the camera angle just a few degrees from the first position. Not so nice but it was clarly visible in the viewfinder and it disappeared the more I raised the camera angle.
In the top image, I have raised the camera such that the sun itself is in the field of view. As you can see, the coloured streaks are all gone and again, only a couple of small circular spots can be seen.

Can a fisheye lens be used as an alternative to a distortion free extreme wide angle lens?
Well, to figure out, I corrected the distorted perspective in Paint Shop Pro. In the two pictures below, I show an original picture taken with the 8mm Peleng fisheye along with the corresponding output after straightening the perspective.
The perspective correction itself leads to a very distorted shape of the image and thus large empty areas in a rectangular picture. The lower picture is therefore cropped to fill a rectangular frame with no empty areas. As you can see, a large fraction of the FOV is lost.

To summarize: Not many amateurs will use such a lens extensively but the fact that it cost about 1/8:th of the Digital Zuiko 7-14mm zoom makes it actually quite a sensible lens to have. The lens is certainly not as good as a high-end lens but for 'creative' photography, it serves it's purpose very well. Here is one other example taken the same day as the motorbike shot above:



This one is taken with ISO 100 and the aperture stopped down to f/16 in order to get as long exposure time of 1/10 sec. I then panned the girl so that everything else got blurred. I cropped off some of the sky as well to get a more interesting scene and an aspect ratio of the Golden Mean.

I hope someone will find this article usefull.

Regards, Jens.

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