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Metabones speed booster – the most exciting adapter ever

January 14^th, 2013

by Sebastian WöberJanuary 14^th, 2013

Very intriguing. Metabones (the Hong Kong based company who created the most renown Canon EF-lens to Sony NEX-camera adapter) introduce an adapter that boosts your lenses speed by 1 f-stop. But there’s more…

Not only does this adapter boost your (fullframe) lenses speed, but it also gives you a wider field of view, makes your lens output sharper and adds a shallower depth of field. Does this make sense?

This actually makes total sense and it’s weird that no one has though of this before:
It’s the principle of lens speed that bringing more lens area onto a smaller sensor heightens the light density thus giving you more speed. Using a bigger portion of your glass on a smaller sensor makes lens faults more irrelevant thus making the image sharper and producing a wider field of view at the same time.

Sample: Your 50mm f/1.4 becomes a very sharp 35mm f/1.0 lens.

This is a quick review by Bryant Naro who had the chance to play with one of these bad boys:

Unfortunately speed has a price, most of all when you’re the only company selling these things.

Let’s hope we see these adapters made for the Blackmagic Cinema Camera soon. This would be ideal as it would bring many benefits to the shortcomings of an amazing recording device with a too small sensor and too little lowlight capabilities.

This doesn’t work for APS-C lenses by the way.

Get it here for a whopping $600: