Hi everybody,
we write from Uruguay, South America, we bougth the h1 three month ago,
After this time we have good impresion about the camera but very bad with the 20x lens... to find focus and no depth of field.
We want to know if someone had experience with de redrockmicro M2 adapter for photo or cinema lenses. We find big price diference between this and the mini 35 one, and never have the oportunity to try any adapter.
thanks and congratulations for this site, we read you almost every day.
Francisco.

Yes. The redrock and XLH1 are great together. In fact, I think it's better than the mini35.

You may have to work at configuring it though... I had to tweak mine to get rid of the wobble in the spinning ground glass... Now that it's fixed, I get perfectly clean footage.

Another option is the LETUS35XL. It's much more convenient as it supplies it's own relay lens and image flip... there's a slight grain to the image when you shoot in HD though.. My redrock image is cleaner.

Jeff,

may I ask you to upload framegrabs or short m2t clips showing off the quality of the XLH1 with your M2?

I must say that I am blown away with the LetusXL35v2 footage posted by disjecta and Benton. I have access to a Mini35 but this $900 adapter seems to be as good or even better.

Now with the XH-A1 coming soon the M2 becomes more interesting again because of the A1's fixed lense. Assuming that the A1 lense will be almost as good as the 20x lens on the H1 your footage would give us an excellent reference of what to expect from an A1 + M2 combo.


The sharpness falloff from the center to the edges is an often criticized flaw of the M2. Did you manage to get rid of that through tuning your setup? Especially on the sharp XLH1 it would be much more an issue than on a HVX.

I hope you will upload that footage, that would be highly appreciated,
Jack

I know a picture is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, It's gonna be a while before I can get footage up. I just bought a PC for editing - moving to Premiere with Cineform to edit my feature, but I don't even own the software yet. I'm slammed with preproduction for my first feature too... so I might not even make it back to this post (sorry).

Edge to edge can be a problem with the M2. There's a tutorial on redrock's site that helps with this. As a last resort, you can always zoom in on the ground glass. The redrock is fairly wide as far as adapters go I guess. Casual testing shows it turns my 70mm Nikon into an effective 90mm. (Although my 19mm Tokina turns into a 40mm though because it has a big hotspot).

If you zoom in farther on the image, (turning the 70mm into a 140mm) it gives you sharp edges.

I owned (and sold) a Letus35XL (v.2). It nearly doubled the focal length at all settings (As I recall my 70mm was turned into an effective 135mm)

As long as the Redrock is configured correctly though, you shouldn't have to zoom in. I spent so long tweaking mine, I feel they're better than the ones Redrock was showing at the DV expo here in LA. Turning them off and watching the ground glass slow down will expose any wobble because the image will pop in and out of focus... I did this to the one they were showing and saw some wobble... I've all but eliminated it on mine.

I sent my first M2 back for servicing (because of wobble) and spent hours tweaking my second one (I own two). Who knows, maybe I'm lucky and have the 2 best units on Earth... I will say they are not easy to configure and heavy and awkward to handle... but the M2 is still my first choice for a clean, grain free image on the XLH1.

The Letus 35XL v.2 is an amazing product too. It's astoundingly convenient and razor sharp right out of the box. The grain is so subtle that it's only visible when the camera moves (and only then when it pans over a light, uniformly colored background). In the end, I felt the M2 was cleaner in HD (in fact, mine are grain free on a 24" dell monitor).. and also just as sharp after tweaking them... that's why I stuck with them.

Light loss: Casual testing showed my M2 to lose about 2 stops of light (My letus lost 1.5 at it's wide open setting... but goes so blurry it's not usable in HD, you have to back off a stop to stay sharp so you really lose about 2.5)

Both the Redrock and the Letus have their flaws... but the beauty of the images are well worth the hassle!

Jeff,

thanks for taking time to write this detailed description. I might come back to you when I got my XH-A1 and M2 and ask you for tuning tips (I will check out the M2 forum as well). When you say "tuning" I assume you mean correctly aligning the M2 to the cam, physically.

Thanks again,
Jack

I'm using the Letus35XL and love it. It has it's problems but for the most part, the results are excellent. I have posted a test elsewhere on this board:

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=72565

Hi again and thank for the answers.
We want to know if the M2 goes over the 20x lens or without it, same for the letus 35, I watched the demo and looks good, but in both cases I coudnt find a picture of the camera with the adapter...
Also I found this http://xl1solutions.com/ADAPTERS.htm.
We still looking for the better choice...
thank again,
francisco.

The M2 uses the XL-H1 20x lens as relay lense, the setup becomes quite long. Check this image out, made by Shane Valdez.

http://realm.cc/upload/realmfilms/images/rr2.JPG

The M2 is better suited for the new XH-A1 or G1 if you ask me. Also, I haven't seen any full size M2 footage from a cam that has as a high resolution as the XL-H1. According to Jeff the image is good, but I would like to see it with my own eyes of course.

Here is a framegrab, also from Shane,

http://realm.cc/upload/realmfilms/images/reganfullrez.tiff

The Letus32 v2 looks much sharper to my eye and does not suffer from the CA that can be seen here. But maybe the sharpness can be optimized like Jeff explained.