The world of Micro Four Thirds adapters is growing and sometimes it surprises you with new products from companies you never heard of it before. The German company Mirex launched a new Micro Four Thirds Tilt Shift Adapter. The adapter is not yet listed on their webpage, but it is available and 43rumors reader Florian owns it. You can read his report and see more pics at Floriansphotos.com.
Current T/S adpaters or lenses for MFT are:
[shoplink 37413 ebay]Arsat Arax Photex 35mm f/2.8 (here on eBay)[/shoplink].
[shoplink 37414 ebay]MC 2.8/20mm TILT/SHIFT lens (here on eBay)[/shoplink].
[shoplink 37415 ebay]Minolta Tilt adapter (here on eBay)[/shoplink].
[shoplink 37416 ebay]Kipon Nikon F mount Lens to Micro 4/3 Tilt & Shift Adapter (here on eBay)[/shoplink].
51 Responses
BOOM! It came to me. Olympus should make a tilt/shift adapter to use 43rds lenses on m43rds bodies!!!! BOOOOM
Now, not being a scientist I could be wrong, but legacy glass often doesnt go wide enough for tilt-shift to be too effective because of the crop.
However imagine throwing the 14-54 or even the 7-14mm f4 Olympus lens on a TS adapter… CMON!!! you could put any 43rds lens and get excellent performance!!!
Okay. Now what is wrong… what have I missed?
Boom no AF Boom or slow AF Boom!
Er? Have you shot with a Tilt and Shift lens? I doubt it. They dont AF. Kaboom.
lol- mind went kaboom
I believe there was a rumor from 2010 about this. I contacted the guy last year, and they said they were still working on it… http://www.43rumors.com/new-tilt-shift-lens-from-hino-microfourthirds/
Wow,
Thanks for the links. That is what I am talking about, but as you can imagine I would hope it would be perfectly optimized (and their guessed price of $400 makes me think it should be well made) gives me hope.
Alas no updates.
The alternative, and I am holding out hope for this, is Olympus introduces tilt shift on their sensor IBIS.
BOOOM!
You won’t have enough coverage to allow shift or tilt with a FT lens, they are made to cover the 4/3 sensor only, unlike legacy glass which were made for larger sensors and thus have enough coverage. I’m not sure whether lenses made for APSC sensors would have enough coverage to allow the needed movements.
How come FF TS/S lenses work on FF bodies then?
Because they are made with a wider coverage than the other usual lenses. This is why they are usually much bigger than other lenses.
@rrr_hhh (love your nick, btw) – it took me some time to understand it. The key is this:
And what that means: adapter goes on a m43 body, Canon EF lens goes on the adapter.
IOW, it should cover the whole 43 image circle, since it adapts 35mm lenses.
@dummy00…
I was answering to Abraham who wrote that Olympus should make a TS adapter to use FT lenses on MFT bodies.
I’m well aware that you can get shift or tilt with FF lenses and the adhoc adapter to MFT lenses. Kipon has recently issued several T or S adapters for different brands and a TS adapter for Nikon F lenses.
The problem is the lack of wide enough legacy lenses to adapt to MFT given the 2x crop factor.
Thanks for the comment on my nick.
See, that is what I was missing. How though did the other company produce test shots with the 50mm f2? Either way, would have been cool 🙂
Bullshit. Tilt doesn’t require wider coverage, it’s only shift that does.
Well shift is what’s important and what we are discussing. You can get a cheap lens baby to tilt, anyone can do that.
you have missed the simple fact that for t/s you need lenses that project a much bigger image circle than that of the sensor, so “legacy” 4/3 glass is absolutely useless for this purpose
OK, I’ve never delved into T/S…
So such FF lenses project an image circle much bigger than the FF format?
They do.
Indeed!
A T/S MMF-4 adapter for usiong native 4/3 ZDs on m4/3!
How cool is that on a scale?!
What an addition to utility and flexibility that would be to m4/3!
Oly, you hear? 🙂
Olympus should release a body with tilt-shift builtin. Kaboom! TS with any lenses, including kit lenses and teles. Kaboom! AF.
Great to see the growing list of after market products. I’m also glad they are using the best available camera for their marketing.
Canon EF mount ??? What a strange choice. So I’d have to spend additional money to use Nikon F mount lenses.
where is the canon fd tiltshift adapter!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?????????????????????
Kipon makes/made one somehwere between $125-$200 on ebay. Had a couple friends who bought it and were disappointed with the results. The optics inside where garbage apparently, and returning it to China cost more than it was worth. They ended up selling it for like, under $50. Bad experience for them.
There are no optical elements in those adapters. The problem rests with the original lenses used. They ma have poor quality by themselves, or the problem s due to the way the light reach to the sensor when the lens is tilted or shifted : sensor don’t like it when the light rays strike at a steep angle, or h sed to much tilt or to much shift : the IQ get wirse as you near the edge of the circl of coverage of a lens.
Do you know which lenses he tried it with ?
I have a Canon FD 35 mm T/S and it is absolutely fantastic. Plenty of room for shift, over 3 full frames. A Metabones adapter will only increase the usefulness as 70mm effective focal length is a bit long for some applications.
Well I can’t speak of first hand experience, but they clearly told me the optical element it had looked bad just by looking at it. They were using Canon FD 35/2, and 50/1.4.
Are you sure that they weren’t using a close up lens instead ? This is how a simple shift adapter looks :
http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-kipon-shift-adapter-Nikon-F-mount-lens-Olympus-Micro4-3-M4-3-camera-/120977742311?pt=US_Lens_Adapters_Mounts_Tubes&hash=item1c2ad5d9e7
(Look at the third photo of the adapter : it is just a two parts tube with one sliding up or down)
When you add tilt, you can move the lens at an angle in addition, but the middle of the tube doesn’t contain any glass, it is just a hole.
I’ll settle for the metabones FD M4/3 adapter at this point. But a t/s FD adpater would be awesome! I really think that now is the the time to buy legacy lenses. Pretty soon both Nikon and Canon will release a formitable mirrorless camera and legacy prices will increase even more than they have in the past few years.
That´s exactly what I suspect to happen, sooner or later! This is why I bought plenty of those beautyful FD lenses. They are going to celebrate a big comeback and the prices will increase even further.
Kipon has released a lot of shift adapters for MFT recently : not only for Nikon lenses, but also for OM lenses, Contax/Yashica, Pentax and M42 mounts :
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p5197.m570.l1313&_nkw=Kipon+shift+micro+4%2F3&_sacat=625&_from=R40
The only issue is that it is impossible to find lenses wide enough for architecture, given the 2x crop factor.
Hopefully Metabones will realize the need for a .5x adapter
Just the non-available thing, to go with my non-existant ultra wide m4/3’s 7mm prime lens!
I have the tilt adapter available through ebay that works quite well for tilting only with my OM28mm f/2.8 &OM50mm f/1.8. This looks quite nicely made, but I bet it won’t be cheap!
Oh not for my OMD
“Since the whole tilt and shift adapter is rather large in diameter, rotating the lens requires space. Before the purchase, I have been warned that the adapter is not compatible with the popular Olympus OM-D E-M5 and that it may touch the flash housing on certain Panasonic Lumix bodies. ” in the article
Booom! €400 WTF!
Boom! operated by an hex screw that needs a separate key! FAIL
Camera body gets in the way! LOL!
NO thumb screw for fixing the tilt for €400 piece of metal…
I once bought this Lensbaby TS adapter and I was disappointed. I am not the most technical expert but I think the term tilt/shift is wrong here. I don’t know if this one here is the same, but what I got from the lens baby is just something that I could easily achieve in Photoshop as well. That is to defocus some parts of the image, for example top and bottom, no matter how near or far the objects were from the lens.
The Lensbabies are tilt only. In addition, they are toy lenses aka not so sharp.
With a good lens a tilt mecanism allows you to modify the plane of focus, aka not only defocus part of the picture, but also put everything infocus from near to infinite, even at wide aperture or with long focals.. You can diminish or expand the DOF with respect of a normal lens of the same focal.
The limitation of a tilt-shift lens is that the image plane is still fixed, and, unlike in a view camera with fully adjustable (up/down, left/right, and tilt/swing) front and rear standards, you still can’t tilt the image plane for fully utilizing the Scheimpflug principle.
Besides allowing rise and fall, which allows to prevent or emphasize keystoning, the great advantage of a shift/tilt lens is that horizontal adjustment allows conventient creation of panorama pictures.
Plane of DOF and converging line adjustment really is the domain of large format view cameras. I don’t mind setting up and fiddling for a few minutes, if I have a 4×5″ camera mounted on a tripod. Small format cameras really are a different tool: mobile, flexible and convenient. I prefer to keep it that way.
Not all viewcameras allow all movements; I have an Arcaswiss 6×9 which allows all, but my main interest is architecture and I didn’t really make use of the tilt. I would love to recover shift to correct keystoning; I have got a very light tripod with a light 3 way head and that would be a perfect and mobile outfit with a native shift lens.
I never claimed all view cameras allowed all movements.
Adriano Lolli also offers tilt-adapters for many manual focus lens systems, including Nikon & Olympus OM: http://www.adrianololli.com/listino.asp?CAT=FOT
To be exact, they’re tilt-only – but so are many of the other mentioned options. And tilt anyway seems to be the thing that interestets people more than shift in these…
Shift is mostly interesting for architecture and since you can’t find legacy lenses wide enough, they have more limited interest.
I have had a system like this since 2010. Maybe I should revisit using it. I had modified a Nikon mount tilt adapter from adrianololli.com and changed the mount to an OM mount. I then mated this tilt adapter with a OM 24 mm 3.5 shift lens. I was getting decent results but not what I thought it was fully capable of. I think I was a millimeter off on the modification since I did not think that I was getting infiniti focus. I should retry this with the OMD.
Well, Canikon, Sigma and Samyang make 14mm f2.8, that would be suitable for this adapter. Any tests out there?
If you never heard about Mirex, well I guess someone who was never interested in landscape photography too much. That company makes best TS adapters for both dSLRs and medium format. Its not exactly cheap, but still cheaper than buying TS-E lens from Canon. 😀
And pretty much only reasonable way to get TS lens on Sony or Nikon (Nikon does have PC-E lens, which are same thing as TS-E, except they are not that good as Canon ones).
About “not-wide” enough lens. Lens used with TS adapters dont need to be too wide, even 20mm lens will be enough cause you can via shift stack 3x photos next to each other which will give you a lot of FOV. Its same as using 45mm medium format lens on FF dSLR with TS adapter. It doesnt seem too wide, but when you make 5 photos stitch its really really wide! 😀
Advantage of using EF as base for adapters is that you can use a lot of EF-to something adapters with combination of this particular TS adapter. Tho obviously some kind of uni-mount with ability to use directly Minolta MD or Canon FD would be great..
“About “not-wide” enough lens.”
Stick on a Sigma 8-16, shift for verticals (APS-C, so there is room to play on m43), *plenty* wide enough.
I have already considered that, but from what I read, the Sigma has a very nasty mustache distortion. This is a no no for architecture. Further, programs like DXO Don’t have profiles for correcting lens which can be shifted and tilted.
And I’m not sure that there is enough coverage for shifting without too much limitations : you get much less leeway.
We really need that someone makes a native wide angle shift lens. Samyang are you hearing ?
Without sample photos I’m not sure that this Mirex adapter which tilts 10 degrees, tilts enough to give a big effect – at that price would certainly not buy without trying it out thoroughly first. I have a cheap tilt adapter similar to this one which tilts only 8 degrees:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Olympus-OM-lens-to-Olympus-Panasonic-Micro-4-3-mount-Tilt-adapter-E-P3-GF3-M43-/261077049472?pt=UK_Photography_CameraLenses_Lens_caps_hoods_adaptors_ET&hash=item3cc967a080
and the defocusing effect is minimal even at the maximum tilt. I also made a DIY tilt lens by bolting the lens & bellows assembly of an Iskra folding medium format camera to a basic M42 adapter (the cheapest metal lens mount I could find – a body cap would also work but I wanted something stronger that I didnt have to cut a big hole through). The bellows allow much more flexibility for extreme tilting (45 degrees or more, which admittedly is too far!), albeit without any repeatable precision as I have not added anything to lock the assembly in a specific position yet. But I have taken more effective and interesting pictures which could not be faked in Photoshop with this lash-up than the manufactured adapter.
My monitor does not like the Mirex website background!
Still no compatible UWA lens to tilt-shift (or just shift) on MFT body. That is the void that needs to be filled. It needs to be 8.5mm and have a large enough image circle to allow at least 5mm shift. Samyang or Kowa or Sigma or Tamron could make one, since Olympus refuses to do so and Panasonic is not interested either.
HCam has built a T-S adapter for Sony A7 FF mirrorless cameras to accept Nikon 14-24 and Canon 11-24 UWA lenses. The lenshood had to be sawed off to prevent vignetting when shifted, but the coverage is sufficient. Maybe the same could be done with the Olympus Zuiko 7-14mm f/4 Four-Thirds lens, using a T-S adapter to MFT body.