XA 10: Wide Angle adaptor vs STD lens

[Robert Young]

The question: How much downside is there to routinely leaving the Canon WD-H58W wide angle adaptor on the camera??
Here is some comparison footage that sheds a little light on the question:
Please note- for some reason this embed is NOT HD. You need to right click on the greyed out "HD", and select "watch in HD on Vimeo"

Canon XA 10: Wide Angle vs Standard Lens on Vimeo

The white balance is locked down for all of the shots, so the color shift is probably due to the WA lens.
Frame grabs enlarged in Photoshop do show some additional softness due to the adaptor, but not much.
Personally, I am feeling better about just leaving it on when it's convenient.

[Buba Kastorski]

if it's something high quality like WD-H58W I wouldn't bother, but there are some less sharp and more CA WA lenses that I would keep on only if I need them

[Robert Young]

Yeah...
I've heard such a variety of opinion about it I decided to try and test it myself.
Once I started I realized that making any valid scientific comparison was going to be way over my head, so I decided that just getting some qualitative/eyeball notion of any effects of the WA was useful enough for my purposes.

[Gerald OConnor]

I cant really tell in your video any major differeces in quality they both look good. The wd-h58w i had was very nice compared to a cheap wide angle I have and I compared my clips from them and the wd-h58w was wider with no vignetting. I think the canon xa10/g10 and xf100 were wide enough for my uses so I got rid of the wd-h58w. The wd-h58w is very solid compared to the cheap lens. How do you like the wider shots with yours.

[Robert Young]

I shoot a lot of travel docs- so, I'm always needing WA shots.
The XA 10 is natively fairly wide (maybe 30mm) and with the addition of the 0.80 adaptor I can get to about the max angle that is just short of unacceptable edge barreling.
So, I am very happy with it.
I find that leaving the adaptor on gives me tremendous versitility for the type of shooting I do.

[Mark Goodsell]

Geez, the WA lens doesn't really expand the picture that much. It looks like the G10 is pretty good w/o a WA adapter. Thanks for sharing

Mark G

[Robert Young]

Originally Posted by Mark Goodsell

Geez, the WA lens doesn't really expand the picture that much. It looks like the G10 is pretty good w/o a WA adapter. Thanks for sharing

Mark G

For the video, the zoom was deliberately adjusted to attempt to create the same angle of view for both the WA and STD shots.
In order to isolate the image quality/characteristics of the two lenses I tried to hold everything else constant: exposure, WB, angle of view, and so forth.
The WA does convert the XA lens from around 30mm to 24mm- a significant increase in angle of view.

[Tom Hardwick]

There's no escaping the laws of nature Robert, and adding an extra three elements in front of your Canon zoom will lower the contrast, lower the sharpness and add to the distortion.

Of course this makes a wide-converter sound a no-no, but it's the effect you're after, and these slight losses can be accepted when you're backed into a corner.

Your film is interesting as even without the lens zoomed to full wide the barrel distortion added by the converter is plainly visible. The whole point of adding the converter is to increase the fov, not to zoom-through - it simply degrades the image. Not by much, granted. But then it's not a very powerful wide-angle, yet it's big, heavy and expensive.

tom.

[Mark Goodsell]

Sorry, Robert. I missed that detail, was it written somewhere? Anyway I didn't see hardly any barrel distortion and only ever-so-slight blurring at the edges. My monitor is not super high performance though.

Would love to see the FOV difference between the stock lens zoomed out and then with the WA lens (also zoomed out). But you probably don't have the time...

Thanks again for sharing,

[Mikko Topponen]

Lower the contrast? But it isn't that good? People have been trying to increase dynamic range and lower the contrast but you can just pluck on a wide angle lens that does it for you! Yay!

I don't think the XA10 is sharp enough to spot the slight resolution loss, these are only HD cameras.

[Robert Young]

Originally Posted by Mark Goodsell

Sorry, Robert. I missed that detail, was it written somewhere?

My bad- I failed to mention that I wasn't shooting full WA with either lens.
The entire purpose for shooting this little test was to determine if I needed to remove the adaptor every time I was not shooting full WA, or if the image quality hit was minor enough to just leave the adaptor on sometimes when shooting run n' gun.
Everyone has their own criteria, but for me, based on this footage, I feel comfortable just leaving the adaptor on when it is convenient.

[Tom Hardwick]

Good answer Robert. In fact Sony sold the PD170 with a wide-converter because its standard zoom's 43mm (equiv) was looking decidedly old fashioned by time it came out. The wide converter made the camera a far more useful run 'n' gun machine.

tom.