From the course: Video Gear

SLR Magic HyperPrime 12mm lens

From the course: Video Gear

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SLR Magic HyperPrime 12mm lens

- Rob, one of my new favorite lens companies, is SLR Magic, I just love these guys, they're great cinema style lenses. - Yeah, well, you know cinema style in the sense that they're sort of declicked, they're fast in terms of aperture, I mean they don't have built in rings and stuff. - A lot of those do, this particular one doesn't. - But no, they're a great company, they've been making lenses for a while now that have garnered the attention of photographers and filmmakers alike, and I think, overall as a company, they're making solid quality, well constructed lenses that are really fast, and this one that we have here, this Hyperprime, really fast, 1.6. - Yeah, and they even have some lenses that go up to 0.95, I just like the quality construction, the built-in screw-off lens cap type, really easy to control, nice ability here. Now, this one is going from 1.6 to F11, and you might be saying well, why not stop down more? With a wide-angle lens, you tend to open it up quite a bit, right? - Yeah, you do, and I mean the thing I really like about this is, it's overall size. I mean, you think for a lens that's operating at a maximum aperture of 1.6, this thing would be huge. Now, this is designed specifically for a Micro 4/3 mount, so Micro 4/3 lenses tend to be a little smaller, but this is miniature even for Micro 4/3, and as fast as it is, and you know, we went out and shot with this at the Flight Trampoline Park in Springfield, Virginia, and we got some really cool footage, and you know, the thing about wide-angle lenses is that they're not for everybody, and they're not for every situation. As we said when we started this episode, they're great for unique perspectives, but they're not without problems, barrel distortion, sort of geometric distortion, but for sort of setting a scene, they're good. Now, one more thing to remember, Rich, especially on Micro 4/3 cameras, and other cropped image sensors, 12mm, not really 12mm. - Yeah, it's more like a 24, we'll take a look at some wider angle things, but this particular lens is nice that it has enough room here so you can manually adjust both aperture and focus. Now, if we look at the shot that we got here, Rob, really not bad on the distortion front, you know, our verticals are pretty vertical throughout the whole scene. - Yeah, and I think this also has to do with the fact that we were shooting on a cropped image censor with this, so you're not gonna get quite as wide, and so, especially when you're shooting on the cropped, some of the sort of inherent geometric distortion that you're gonna get, is not going to be as pronounced. - But good sensitivity to light, and I really like, as I went through the soft focus areas, the blooming is quite nice, very natural. - Yeah, it does have sort of a very natural look to it, sometimes these fast lenses can get a little splotchy, or do weird things in the spectral highlights, but it has a really nice response. - And then over here, we have one more shot where we tested the lens, and pretty good, a little bit of bending, you could see that still, technically at 12mm, we have a little curvature. - Yeah, and again if you put, you know, this is again, Micro 4/3 mount, but if you were to mount this on a full frame camera and truly get 12mm on it, you might see that distortion more pronounced. - Yeah, but not bad, captured the whole action, were you able to get that in there, and I'm really happy that it just held up well. We had netting detail here, we have brick texture, and a lot of times those sensors will really react badly to that, this lens held high in some of those moire issues, we purposely shot into some netting and the brick texture here, so I think overall, given the quality of this lens, we should take a look at that at full speed. - Yeah, it looks cool. - Not too bad, it let us capture the whole scene. Pretty straightforward, filter size 58mm, easy to get filters for that, if you need to put it in. Reasonable aperture, 1.6 to 11, and they call this a Hyperprime, because it's designed to let in a lot of light. - Yeah, and the F1.6 is quite a bit of light, to let into the sensor. Now it's pretty light, it's just under a pound, it's about 3/4 of a pound, which is really nice. - Especially for an all metal lens. - Yeah, I know, which is nice. Just keep in mind that doesn't have any image stabilization or other features, this is a prime lens, it's meant to be image quality first, without a lot of bells and whistles that you're gonna get in other lens systems. - There is no auto focus on this lens, this is all manual, as Rob said, no image stabilization, but one of the things that I really like about it is the blades are very easy for the aperture control. - Yeah, I mean we have 12 blades in here, which is gonna give us that nice diffused boca, on highlights we're gonna have no weird star patterns or things of that nature, we're gonna get a nice out of focus look to it, with that 12 blade aperture. - And, while we talked about this as a Micro 4/3 lens, SLR Magic makes a variety of mounts, so just be sure to check them out, and you can use this on all sorts of sensors, or use it with an adapter to put it on a different type of mount.

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