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Comparing 3 circular fisheye lenses

Astigmatism
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Astigmatism Collaborator

Astigmatism

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I like circular fisheyes and would love to see Fuji offer one for X mount. But until they do, the 3 available ones I know of are made by 7 Artisans, Laowa (Venus), and Meike (or Voking). I have all three (including one labeled Meike which Amazon says is no longer available, but what looks like the same lens is now available with the Voking brand). It's debatable whether I'm more of a photographer or a collector, but I do love lenses. I recently tried to compare the 3 fisheyes carefully.
I think the whole point of a circular fisheye is to capture as much angle as possible, so I measured how big an angle each lens captures. I set up a blinking light at a great distance, and mounted each fisheye on my camera on a stable surveying tripod with a graduated azimuth head. The light and the lens were at the same height and the camera was leveled. I measured how big an angle I could swing each lens by, such that the blinking light was barely visible in the viewfinder. All the lenses covered more angle than they claimed, but they exceeded their claims by different margins. The claimed angles and the observed angles are ranked the same way. 7 Artisans wins this contest, but only by 4.5 degrees, while Meike trails behind by 18.5 degrees which is a way bigger difference.
Here's a table of the focal lengths, aperture ranges, claimed and observed coverage angles, and the number of elements and groups in the construction.

Fisheye        f          Aper    Claimed Observed Elem Groups

7 Artisans     4 mm      f/2.8-16   225    227.5    10    8
Laowa          4 mm      f/2.8-16   210    223.0     7    6
Meike         6.5 mm     f/2-22     190    204.5     6    5

I also took pictures with each lens at its most open and closed aperture settings. I mounted the camera on a stout tripod using an ARCA-like clamping system so I could reproduce the aim used with each lens. I shot downward toward a gravel bank, nice and contrasty, with the sun pretty nearly aligned behind the camera on axis. There were lots of tree branches against the sky around the edge of the image, and I blew up these parts of the images to compare them.
These are manual focus lenses and I used focus peaking at widest aperture to assist focusing. Note that lenses like these have more depth of field than focusing range for their moderate and small apertures; that is, you officially don't have to bother focusing them, because everything is within the depth of field. All the same, I did focus them in their open aperture state. I had ISO at 250 and let the camera choose shutter speed. I used the self timer and the electronic shutter to minimize any shaking of the camera on the tripod. All the shutter speeds wound up being more than fast enough to freeze any motion in this still life.
There's a huge difference between wide open and stopped down. The wide open images all lose a great deal of brightness further from the center of the picture. This is vastly improved in the pictures that are stopped down.
My picture here is a slice of each, without any doctoring, moved and sized to match each other as well as I could by eye. The lens maker is noted in red on each slice. Notice you can pick out many details in the branches that are common to all photos.
The Laowa does the best by far. The 7 Artisans is not as sharp, and has a great deal of lateral color aberration. The Meike is much blurrier still. Oddly, I keep finding the Meike doesn't look as saturated to me, though I have no idea how a lens can lower saturation. Also, while you have to look pretty close to find a few little edge area details that are captured by the 7 Artisans and missed by the Laowa, both of them have way better coverage than the Meike.
So I'm concluding it's the Laowa I'll use most, though it's possible in some extreme situation I might use the 7 Artisans to get the widest possible angle. Don't know what I'd use the Meike for.

 

 

 

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jerryy Grand Master

jerryy

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1 hour ago, Astigmatism said:

I haven't tried either the PerGear or the Rokinon. They're full frame fisheyes, which I've never been interested in. But if anybody else has tried them, it'd be great to get more information here.

The Rokinon lens can be used on a full frame body, but it is intended for APS-C bodies:

https://rokinon.com/products/8mm-f3-5-fisheye

I had a copy for a while, it worked pretty well, had good color and nice fishy-ness. If you needed to, you could carefully align the lens horizontally on your tripod and then when using software to finish, you could get a reasonably wide angle de-fished image.

Edited by jerryy
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Astigmatism Collaborator

Astigmatism

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I tried a series of photos to show how vignetting works as the lens aperture is varied, for the Laowa fisheye. I took outdoor shots low to the ground on a tripod, as I adjusted the aperture ring through each labeled f/ stop detent. Shutter speed was automatic. I pasted a middle slice through the circular image for each aperture into a single slide, then labeled and marked that to post here. The aperture is indicated off the right end of each slice. A red line marks the horizontal center. The slices all contain the same pixel locations from the photos and were treated identically. The photos themselves were all done identically except for the manual aperture settings and the automatic shutter speeds compensating for them.

You can see the ends of the slices are darkened for larger apertures but it improves as aperture is reduced.

I kind of figure that at f/8 and narrower I'm unlikely to notice the vignetting in most pictures. Of course, fisheyes are easy to get enough light into, even handheld in dim conditions.

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