Opteka Teleconvertor Lens - Good or bad?

[polopaul69]

I have a Nikon Coolpix 8800 and i a mthinking of buying a teleconvertor lens to it, and i have found one of interest on ebay, and it is made by a brand called OPTEKA.

I have heard of Opteka before,but i don't really know what quality their lenses are like. A genuine Nikon Teleconvertor is a few hundred pounds !!

Can anyone shed any light on what they are like, their own thoughts would be of help.

Any links to reviews would also be helpful....

[another view]

I have the Nikon fisheye and wide adapter for my older Coolpix 5000, and they're surprisingly good. I'm not sure if aftermarket would be this good, but if they have a return policy where you can try it out for a day or two it might be worth that chance.

[mjs1973]

I have a 3rd party 2x teleconvertor for my Canon EOS gear. It gets me closer to my subject, but the loss of sharpness is very noticable. Check ou the moon pics I took in this thread.

http://forums.photographyreview.com/...4217#post94217

The blue moon was shot without the TC, the brown on with. Can you notice the differance? I sure can.

My TC isn't an Opteka, so who knows how they compare , but I thought this might help you out a bit. My suggestion, if you're serious about photography, save up, and get a good quality TC.

[another view]

I guess one thing to clarify is that a Coolpix 8800 (or any Coolpix) uses adapter lenses, not teleconverters. These adapter lenses screw onto the front of the lens that's built into the camera to give it a shorter or longer focal length than it would have without. A teleconverter is used on interchangeable lens cameras, and mounts between the lens and the body, usually giving 1.4X or 2X magnification (and an equivalent loss in aperture).

They do the same thing (at least in the case of telephoto adapters) but are used differently. However, what Mike says and what I hinted at are pretty much how it works - good glass costs good money. The piece that's specifically designed for a particular camera or lens will always give the best results, but it may be expensive.

[Don Schaeffer]

From Adorama, I bought an Opteka converter for my Kodak Z740. That Kodak lens goes (in 35 mm terms) from 38 mm to 380 mm. The Optika lens I bought was marked .45 x which would have given me a 17 mm performance. However, comments in the forum made me realize that this was not what I was getting. When I measured the lens, I found it to be .7x (27 mm performance). The lens was misrepresented. The performance of the lens was ok, Then I bought a .38 x Kenko lens from Adorama. This actually did give me a very satisfying fish-eye like 14 mm equivalent.

Make sure you have the right screw in adapter for your camera. They often don't come with them.

[Frog]

And the original post is from Oct. 2005

[mn shutterbug]

And the original post is from Oct. 2005

And the original poster still has 0 posts.

[byjamesderuvoDHQ]

I'm not much of a teleconverter fan. Too many tradeoffs of light loss and image clarity loss. Nat to mention camera shake. And you can do so much more in software these days.