The HVX200 is a light-eater to begin with. When I shoot the DVX100 and the HVX200 side-by-side I am constantly opening the HVX200 by an additional stop to get a similar exposure. You have no idea what a pleasure it was to work with a 35mm adapter with the image right side up in the frame. I have been shooting with inverted images for a couple of years now, and I have developed many techniques for coping, but nothing is as easy as not having to worry about it.
first time I used it was at noon on a bright summer day and it made me wish that I lived on a planet with two suns. The combination of the HVX + 35mm adapter + a slow lens = a very dark image. In fact, the only thing I can think of using the Tamron for is day-for-night shots.
When I have tried this lens with other adapters, I could not even see well enough to focus it, but with the Letus35 the lens was still usable. The images are crisp where they are supposed to be in focus and beautifully blurred where they are supposed to be blurred.
I then switched to a Nikon f2.8 20mm-70mm zoom lens and set up some items to test various focal planes. I’ve added a white line to show you what I was focusing on in the scene.
Now let me tell you what I see in these images.
#1) Edge-to-edge sharpness. The optics are perfectly aligned.
#2) No color distortion, fringing, or color separation.
#3) Undetectable loss of brightness toward the edges.
It’s important to note that 35mm lenses generally are brighter in the middle of the image than on the edges. And with all the lenses and the screen and the prism to flip the image, there is a lot of glass between the camera and the scene that could accentuate light loss and make it look like the image was shot in a tunnel.
I’ve seen this before with other adapters, and it has the effect of putting the audience outside of the shot – outside of the story – when that’s the opposite of what you want.
In this case, the image looks familiar to me – the change in brightness I’d expect from film.
