why are wide angles & fisheyes so expensive?

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gibbon

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Andy Gilbert
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I dont get why i cant find a "equivilently" priced wide angle / fish eye lens?

You know like i have the 50 - 250mm IS zoom lens by canon and its good price and a good quality lens.

the 50mm 1.8 prime, again sharp nice pics, made by canon and well very cheap for image quality.

So what about a wide angle or fisheye lens? I just cant seem to find one.

I know my camera has a 1.6 crop factor, but im trying to find one for car shots when i go to shows. So as low as i can go without breaking the bank? It seems its.... impossible?

Thanks
Andy
 
My Sigma 10-20 cost me a little over £300. Not exactly extortionate when you consider how much Canon charges for their L zooms and primes, which on a crop body you don't really benefit from as you never see the edges anyway.
 
i think what he is saying is why isn't there a cheap equivalent of a wide angle.

There are lots of portrait primes around £250-£300 but you can get a 50mm 1.8 for £80.

There are many zooms in the £300+ range but you can get the 50-250 for £130

Wide angles typically £300 plus why is there no £150 equivalent?

the cheaper lens would be of poorer build quality and not as sharp as the others but why doesn't it exist?
 
joescrivens said:
the cheaper lens would be of poorer build quality and not as sharp as the others but why doesn't it exist?
Click to expand...
Because it would be like looking through a wide-angle milk bottle and reviewers in magazines and posters on forums would scoff at it?
 
Hi, cheers joe, exactly my point. And just to clarify, im not arguing the point or anything. Im still always learning stuff, and sort of new there must be some real reason behind it so was just wondering.

So voyager, are you saying that a fish eye / wide angle lens needs to be alot better quality than say a cheap prime or zoom to get the equivilent quality result? hence there more expensive?

Andy
 
It needs to be a lot better quality to eliminate unwanted distortion and abberations
 
Probably because it isn't economically viable.
SWA and fish eye lenses are pretty specialist so i would guess are not subject to the same volume of sales that other more common focal length lenses are.

Like you say, a 50mm f1.8 is only £80, cheap as chips but canon sell a lot of them.
Where as a 10-22mm is around £600, its a more specialist lens so less are sold.

However both ways generate a reasonable profit.

Selling a small amount of low quality specialist lens for little money is no way to run a business.
 
If you're after a cheap option there's screw-on fisheye adapters that will fit on other lenses. Quality is far from great but it might be worth considering.
Alternatively stick the camera on a tripod, take several shots at different angles and merge them together later
 
UWAs are difficult to make and require some pretty nifty glass tricks to make sure there isn't much distortion or CA so they are expensive.

Nifty fiftys are simple to make and therefore cheap.
 
It's been a big bug-bear since moving over to Nikon that it doesn't produce cheaper long zooms, like Canon's f/5.6 400mm (is this now discontinued?). However, like it's been pointed out, the cheaper the lens when you're pushing the envelope, the more compromises there have to be made and probably these days a cheap. sub-£200 wideangle 10-20mm equivalent would be pretty pants.

However, it's not impossible to get cheap wide-angle lenses; compared to the £600 Canon 10-22mm you could easily pick up a used Tokina 12-24mm for about half that. OEM lenses are generally more expensive anyway so 3rd-party if often the best way when you're on a budget.....
 
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