That doesn’t mean that you can’t use more budget-friendly alternatives. Now, with focal reducers, you get what you pay for. If you want to set your camera to something like f/22, you will need to remove your booster. Something to take into account is that while focal reducers boost the maximum aperture of the lens, they also boost the minimum. But you can’t do it the other way around without heavy vignetting.
What this also means is that for a focal reducer to work, the lens should be designed for a larger sensor than that of the camera.įor example, you can use a lens designed for a full-frame or APC-S sensor on an MFT camera. This can be very helpful if you need to shoot in low light or achieve a very shallow depth of field. So while the same amount of light passes through the lenses, it’s essentially packed into a smaller area of the sensor. The curved glass of the focal reducer concentrates the light entering through your lens onto the sensor.
Gain One Stop of Extra LightĪlso, the added glass is the reason focal reducers make the lens “faster,” adding up to an extra stop of exposure. Instead of measuring the distance from your lens to the sensor, the focal length of your camera is now affected by a piece of glass between the lens and the sensor.Īnd since the f-number is found by taking the focal length and dividing it by the aperture diameter, reducing the focal length makes the f-number smaller and therefore faster. The addition of glass in these adapters effectively puts a lens between the original lens and the camera, which shortens the focal length. How Does A Focal Reducer (Speedbooster) Work?Ī large factor that makes focal reducers different from standard lens adapters, and more expensive, is that they have glass in them. When you put a focal reducer on an MFT sensor, you’ll actually get a wider field-of-view than you get on a super 35mm/APS-C sensor. In this guide, we will be focusing specifically on Micro Four Thirds (MFT) mounts. The different sensor-sizes will affect the impact focal reducers have. A typical “dummy” adapterīut a focal reducer is constructed in such a way, that you do not only gain an extra stop of light but also a wider field of view when you do so.įocal reducers only exist for mirrorless cameras, because the mirror in a DSLR camera would get in a way, because of the way these adapters are functioning.įocal reducers exist for a lot of different mirrorless cameras with cropped sensors. Now, you can get a lot of adapters – electronic adapters as well as “dummy” adapter – which does that as well. For example, you can use a full-frame Canon lens with EF-Mount on a Micro-Four-Thirds camera. What is a Focal Reducer?Ī focal reducer is a lens adapter that adapts larger lenses to smaller sized a.k.a. If you have used focal reducers though, or are familiar with their functionality, you can skip the next section of the article and jump straight to the best alternatives to the Metabones Speedbooster. If you’ve never used a focal reducer, we recommend you read this guide first and get to know how focal reducers work on a basic level.
And the high prices make this technology seem inaccessible to a lot of filmmakers.īut, luckily, there are plenty of cheap and lesser-known alternatives on the market, and we’ll take a look at some of the best out there in this guide.īut first, we’ll offer a brief overview of how the focal reducers function. Metabones Speed Boosters are top of the line adapters and their prices reflect that.
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