Bower SLY 358P 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye Lens For Pentax APS-C Cameras

Comments about Bower SLY 358P 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye Lens For Pentax APS-C Cameras:

I bought this lens looking for a solution to shoot bands performing in very small places. I am very happy with the field of view; although I find things unintentionally slipping into frame- this is no fault of the lens however.

Wide open this lens is very soft and chromatic aberration is very noticeable. At 5.6 things get better yet the chromab is still strong. F/8 can produce print-ready results but the chromab is still apparent.

Although I bought this lens for club/band photography I find myself using it more often for landscape and architecture.

There is no distance scale on the barrel but with such a huge depth of field, scale focusing is still very possible. Just set the lens to F/8 at 2 meters and you're set.

I would buy this lens again; however, I would get the cheaper model that does not support aperture-priority shooting. It is nearly $100 less in price and since I usually shoot at F/8, I wouldn't find myself saving time controlling aperture on the body.

All in all, a great deal if you want an inexpensive fisheye. Build quality is impressive for the price and at F/8 it is more than sharp enough for the price.

Comments about Bower SLY 358P 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye Lens For Pentax APS-C Cameras:

I bought this lens based on price, but I will rate based on quality, as that is the single most important question IMHO.

The build quality is decent. The performance for me application (HDR panoramic photography) is not.

I shoot with a K-7 and do HDR processing on RAW images outside the camera. This lens, while decent for single shots at f9 to f11 (suffering from exceptionally soft focus at wider apertures and from visual artifacts associated with smaller openings), just can't be used in an HDR setting. Why? The soft focus inherent in the lens is exacerbated by the HDR process, resulting in images that are just way too noticeably soft.

So for my application, this lens is a non-starter.

Comments about Bower SLY 358P 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye Lens For Pentax APS-C Cameras:

This is a great lens for wide angle work. However there is one vital (and inexpensive) item missing. It is a depth of field scale. In the manual it points to the focusing index mark as the depth of field, which is incorrect. Please correct this in future models!!

Comments about Bower SLY 358P 8mm f/3.5 Fisheye Lens For Pentax APS-C Cameras:

I've been looking for some time for a fisheye lens and the Bower caught my eye. It's made in South Korea by Samyang and a review on lenstip convinced me to give it a try. Note that this lens is available under a variety of names, including as Vivitar 7mm.

The lens is plastic with a metal mount. I expected it to be fully manual, but I discovered that the Pentax version actually allows for control of aperture in camera, unlike the Canon/Nikon versions. This means that the only manual aspect is focusing.

Due to the extreme angle of view, focusing can be trickier than you might expect - there isn't really a focus plane, but a focus sphere, and since everything looks pretty small, it's pretty hard to focus through the visor - I usually just set the focus by evaluating the distance to a point of interest and then setting that on the focus ring.

Because the aperture ring can be set to A, the only thing you need to manipulate is the focus ring. The ring is well built and feels nice to control - in fact the build of this lens feels pretty solid.

In terms of IQ, the resolution is pretty good, but as expected, it falls a bit in the corners in part due to them being out of focus as well. Chromatic aberations of the magenta-green variety can also show up when photographing areas with high-contrast, but this is a weakness that Pentax wide-angles share as well. Flare can show up too in certain situations, but overall, I felt that the multi-coating did a good job.

Lenstip and another review I found mentioned that this lens uses stereographic projection - seems like it's the only available lens to do so. This type of projection does a better job at maintaining the proportions of objects in the corners of the image than other types of porjections. The end result is that the images are more pleasing and the fish-bowl effect is less pronounced, making the lens more useful for general photography because it's not restricted just to optical effects.

Some small details - the lens doesn't have a serial number and the package included a lens pouch, which I thought was a really nice touch. The lens cap feels a bit flimsy, but it does it job. Due to the shape of the lens, no filter can be attached to it - you might want to also get a good micro-fiber cleaning cloth just in case.