Customer Reviews

Olympus FCON-02 Fisheye Lens

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This lens kit includes the fisheye lens, a couple of adaptors to Olympus point and shoot digital cameras (I use a D-460Z), and a tripod mount that positions the lens directly over the forward nodal point to eliminate parallax for panorama stitching. It works very well, especially considering the prices of standard wide angle lenses at ten times this price.

I recommend stitching with MGI PhotoVista (http://www.mgisoft.com) and take your photos with minimal or no compression such as TIFF mode (4 megs) and compress later for Web viewing top quality panoramas. Crop out the black "tunnel" with PhotoShop if you can afford it.

For panoramas it is critcal to get your nodal point directly over the center of the tripod to avoid parallax. Be sure your tripod head has the attachment screw directly centered. Many tripods don't do this and the offset will kill your stitching efforts. For more info see http://www.panoguide.com.

This lens came with a tripod mount and a couple of adapters, one of which fits my Olympus D-490 zoom. The adapters seem to work well but being plactic 'clip-ons' they're not very robust. The IPIX software doesn't work for the D-490 hi-res images but you can downsize the pix to make them 'fit'. Although more complex, Helmut Dersch's Panarama Tools are better but you will need to crop the images first.