Re: Speaking from personal experience...
nnowak wrote:
Thanks for the debate - I can understand your reasoning but like my own better
Tom Caldwell wrote:
nnowak wrote:
I have hacked together two electronic focal reduction adapters for the M series. One was built from an original Metabones SpeedBooster and the other was the newer Metabones SpeedBooster Ultra.
All of the Metabones claims are true. Yes, it makes the base lens sharper. Yes, it gives you one stop more light. Yes, it gets you closer to the true full frame focal length. Yes, AF is fully functional.
Sounds wonderful, right? Wellllll.... First off, these things aren't cheap. it is a minimum of $500 for the Metabones version. I am sure Canon could build one for less, but it would probably be at least $300. Second, you don't completely turn your M into a full frame camera. The focal reducer does not improve the dynamic range of your sensor to full frame levels. Third, the adapters aren't perfect. Optical quality will be better than the bare lens on your M, but not quite as good as the bare lens on a full frame camera. Finally, these things really only make sense when paired with big lenses with bright apertures.
Add the cost of the focal reducer on top of the cost of an M5 and you are basically at the price of a full frame 6D. However, you don't get all of the image quality benefits of the 6D. Personally, I find the Speedboosters fun to play with, but it is a lot easier and more effective to just use the lenses on a full frame camera. Image quality is better and I don't need to shuffle adapters.
Better still just stick with my M4/3 bodies and off the shelf Metabones adapters that work very well. The Metabones Ultra gives me aps-c on M4/3 which I personally find very satisfactory and it is much the same as EF lenses are going to give on the M5 with the regular EF-EF-M adapter. (aps-c on the M5 it has a few more MP of course)
The adapters are expensive but if we have the EF lenses then one adapter costs less than one crazy good lens that does not even exist in EF-M land.
If optical quality is better than the bare lens on EF-M then there are some that might appreciate this.
In your case, it would be better than the bare EF lenses on m4/3, but not as good as the bare lenses on a Canon crop body.
Well the images have been good enough for my purposes on M4/3 bodies so basically I care little whether or not a focal reduction adapter is made for the M5. But it is so obviously the missing elephant in the room that it is surprising that it is not being seriously considered. Perhaps the target audience here are just EF-M mount users who are looking for compact ML type cameras and not EF lens users lookong for a capable body to use them on that is firstly more affordable and secondly not dslr.
There is also a fixation coming from the same market sector that the only reason why ML camera should exist is for compact size lenses. Therefore there is no pull from the fact that the ML technology is slowly coming to succeed the mirror box viewfinder. Therefore there is no real necessity for "compact size" to be the driving factor if the technology takes over. We don't see the present owners of dslr bodies resiling from the size of bodies and the lenses attached. So why might they object to using the same lenses on the M5?
What I would be interested in is if such a focal reduction adapter could match oem levels of focus rate - as the operating firmware should be no different to the base adapter I could not see why not.
AF with my hacked adapters on my M2 was the same using the same lenses with the standard EF to EF-M adapter. Just like the standard EF to EF-M adapter, there is no "firmware". It is just straight through wires.
Yep, I know that. All types of Metabones adapters use the same firmware whether or not lenses are involved.
Without meaning in any way to reduce the technical significance and implementation of your efforts are you sure that your hack has kept the high precision necessary in the optics intact? I realise that the optics merely need to correct the light path from the length of the EF mount to the EF-M mount but that must be different that the equivalent correction needed for the Sony E mount or the M4/3 mount. My optics knowledge is very basic and I presume that you are better qualified than I am to make the flange focal distance correction without loss of optical quality.
Furthermore the M5 has a new sensor and perhaps the M2 comparison is also a strained comparison and make-do in the absence of a released M5 to compare with.
No matter what FF EOS cameras can do I hvae not bought a dslr body since I bought a 5D new and will continue to avoid them.
That dslr camera bodies are becoming more affordable seems to indicate that they have to do this to remain in the race.
Not at all. The 11 year old 5D can be found for about $300 used. The 8 year old 5D II can be found for around $700 used. The $1500 6D is now 4 years old. If you want the latest and greatest 5D IV, it is $3500. "Affordable" full frame cameras are merely a consequence of the typical price decline over the life cycle of a product.
You hit the nail on the head. I simply don't wish to use dslr bodies any more. I had six dslr bodies up to the 5D when I stopped. I looked at my collection - I still had three bodies that I was using concurrently and the grey matter whirred and I thought -"I am just buying exactly the same thing, only better every couple of years at $3,500 a pop". Even a great ML body is only a maximum of perhaps $1,200 per box and then the ML mob go wild eyed at the "huge expense".
So I stopped at the 5D and saved myself a $3,500 exercise in each of 5DII, 5DIII, 5DIV and maybe a side diversion to the 5DRS, and more than probably an aps-c body or two in there somewhere. Even if there was a viable second hand resale market in my country I would be looking at a annual value depreciation of at least $1,500 per body to stay updated with a single unit of the best. Having more than one body just magnifies the pain. So keeping the 5D was kinder on the bank balance. But by now M4/3 bodies will arguably out shoot it. If the 5D made and continues to make "oh wow" images then surely even M4/3 sensors are also up to the oh-wow level? The 24mp aps-c sensor on the M5 must be surely capable of making very creditable images otherwise they would be unsaleable. So if the focal reduction adapter does out shoot the M4/3 sensor with EF lenses then it must be a useful accessory for some that have EF lenses.
... and so, an affordable M5, a focal reduction adapter EF to EF-M, some lovely EF lenses to play with. The focal reduction adapter gives me FF field of view with my EF lenses and will never be obsolete and need replacing. There is another stop of light to use as a bonus. The M5 has a capable sensor. The prospects of fast C-AF are good. The sensor will give me good enough results for my plebian tastes. You have advised me that your hacked focal reduction adapter will give me better images than the plain adapter on a M2 body (not worse). I think that the new sensored M5 with a focal reduction adapter will be good enough for my purposes. No need to worry about the misisng EF-M lenses - I have EF lenses enough already - why should I wish to re-buy them? If I want small format lenses in small format bodies then M4/3 is the way to go - why bother with a few "slightly smaller" lenses on EF-M considering that they will be useless on an EF-M body if it ever gets a FF sensor. If I wish for an eventual FF mirrorless camera body then I might as well keep my EF lenses anyway. The size of EF lenses has never been a real bother for me. Many years down the track and I have never felt the need to upgrade them. I wish I could say the same about expensive dslr bodies.
EF-M makes little sense locked into aps-c lenses - the lenses are not going to be appreciably smaller and re-buying an existing lens stock seems silly.
A plain adapter and a focal reduction adapter with the M5 gives the same amount of mix and match capability as a aps-c + FF dlsr camera body owned at the same time. And at the cost of a single state of the art dslr you could have two compact M5 bodies both adapter types, more easily carried, and some change left over.
Seems win win win ....
