Century Optics 16:9 Anamorphic Converter.

[Robert Hart]

Way back near when Noah was still boatbuilding, I designed and made a prototype Sony PD150 lens hood bayonet to 52mm filter thread adaptor to fit this converter to Nikon lenses I was using on a Mini35 and Letus 35mm adaptor.

This optic is not the sharpest kid on the block. The Panasonic anamorphic for their DVX camera family is said to be better. For an unrelated reason we are getting one made in more robust metal than the prototype which was made up from plastic.

Given that the metal machinist is setting up a CAD machine to do it, is there anyone who would want one made whilst the machine is tasked. There may be other adaptors already out there. Any advice on these would be appreciated as it might save some time and effort here if there are such already available. To get it done here is costing in Australian dollars.

 

[Robert Hart]

Furthur to my earlier post, Dirk Ulex, our local engineer, requested me to take my Sony PD150 camera down to be sure of the dimensions. My plastic prototype was a bit rough. In October, he will be installing a full CAD driven machine for turning, indexing and milling and would then be able to do either bulk lots or special orders from the stored profile.

Once he has that up and running, he will be in a better position to quote a price. Hopefully for you, our Australian dollar may have started to tank. China's economy to which our is closely tied, is having a b it of a hiccup.

They could be made in delrin, but that stuff may not have such a good performance with fine 0.7mm filter threads, so likely my two here will be done in aluminium. Our local aluminium anodising is apparently a bit of a problem, so the adaptors I am having made will be soft-surfaced and bright. The anamorphic and Nikon lens are close-coupled so reflection should not be an issue but I will paint inside to be safe.

 

[Robert Hart]

Furthur to my above post, I did not have a metal adaptor mount made as Dirk the engineer ended up with a big job run for the mining industry to keep him busy for a while.

I had a bit more of a play with the 16:9 lens to 2K. 2k as defined by the SI2K camera is 2048 x 1152 x five micron pixels. as detailed below. How 2K scales on a RED MX sensor I do not know.
I offered up a Century Optics anamorphic adaptor to two lens sets for the SI2K, Cinema Products Ultra T* 9mm, 12.5mm, 16mm, 25mm and Optar ( Lumatech ) Illumina, 12mm, 16mm, 25mm 50mm.

This anamorphic lens I have, was desgned as a zoom-though front attachment for the 1/3" sensor Sony DSR PD150 and I think it may have fitted the contemporary Canon MiniDV lens-in-camera model which bore a similar lens system.

On the CP lenses, as closely coupled as can be, it seems to work on all including the 9mm. I need to do some furthur looking at it on the 9mm as there may be some edge brightness falloff at tighter apertures.

The field of view is widened such that as example, the 16mm view is widened to that approximately of the 12.5mm.

The sharpness readings were reduced by only 5 points on the wide lenses with the anamorphic on front which surprised me. On the 25mm, the picture is less pretty as more sharpness is lost. The longer lenses may require recollimation to achieve infinity focus with the adaptor on front.

In conversion from the native 16:9 of the SI2K to near cinemascope, there might be a notional gain of apparent vertical sharpness to offset the softening of the horizontal stretch. This was the rationale for the adaptors as 16:9 was otherwise achieved on the PD150 by cropping the top and bottom of frame at the cost of vertical resolution.

In the real world of theatrically projecting via anamorphic lenses, the 16:9 to cinemascope arrangement does not conform to any existing standard so far as I know. The image would have to be furthur laterally shrunk to rescale to the 4:3 frame of the cinemascope image for theatrical projection.

I would not be confident there would be any advantage remaining by the time all that rescaling and pixel stretching was done with.

The Illumina 16 lenses do not fare so well. Because of their design in which the lens front elements are deeply recessed, a close clouple of the 16:9 adaptor is not possible. Therefore the usable lenses start at 16mm where there remains a slight edge vignette, the 25mm performs similarly to the CP 25mm. The 50mm image yield through the 15:9 adaptor is observably softer.

There you go, some more useless information for you.


Clip link below is to a quick 2K test of the adaptor with image squashed and a bit of colur and levels added to the RAW SI2K image. Darling Films is not my production entity but that of the subject in the clip, Steve Rice who owns the camera the clip was shot on. I don't know how to make the clip appear in this post so the link is as best as I can do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0AXKRsUCe4