With so many beautiful deep sky objects out
there, how do you pick which one to shoot? Well with fisheye lenses you don't have to pick,
because you will literally shoot the whole night sky in a single photo. Hello, this is Nico Carver.
I'm a deep sky astrophotographer and in this video i will be testing and reviewing five fisheye
lens in terms of their night sky performance. You can find all of my test results and reviews
for these lenses at astrolenses.com. I received no compensation to make this video i rented the sigma
15 and the canon 8 to 15 from lensrentals.com i already owned the sigma 8 millimeter circular
fisheye i bought the opteka from amazon with proceeds from my patreon and the tt artisan
lens was kindly loaned to me from the company for the purpose of this unbiased review
i tested these lenses on my canon eos ra camera i'm shooting on right now which is a
full-frame camera with an extended ha response helpful for picking up nebulae it's an rf mount
camera so the only lens that fit directly was the tt artisan the other lenses i adapted
with a canon ef to rf adapter okay that's the disclosure and sort of the setup let's jump
into the physical characteristics of these lenses okay starting with opteka 6.5 millimeter f3
this is a lens that comes in at 165 dollars it's available on canon ef and nikon f
mounts it's designed for apsc or crop sensors uh but it will work still on full frame
you just have to remove the removable lens shade and you get a circular fisheye look on
full frame and a diagonal fisheye look on crop sensors the lens shade is easy to
remove you just press a button and twist has click stops for the aperture from f3 to
f22 it's all manual um including the focus ring unfortunately the manual focus ring on the
copy i have doesn't work it doesn't actually focus uh at all to infinity or anything it just sort of
stays the same so uh this was something that i'll mention more when we get to the star tests and it
was the biggest downside to this lens is that it wouldn't uh really focus the opteka with lens caps
on measures 105 millimeters tall 90 millimeters across and with lens caps off it's 85 millimeters
tall with lens caps off it's 524 grams or one one pound three ounces with one caps on it's
580 grams or one pound five ounces okay moving on to the tt artisan 11 millimeter f 2.8 this
retails for about 215 dollars it's available for all the different mirrorless mounts including
canon rf nikon z l mount m mount and sony e-mount it's all metal construction it's very heavy for
its size all manual has a metal lens cap a small metal lens shade that's not removable it's
a clickless aperture control goes from f 2.8 to f 16.
Both the aperture control and the focus
ring are very tight which i like they're sort of a little bit difficult to move it measures 100
millimeters with caps on 70 millimeters across uh 82 millimeters with caps off it weighs 502
grams with all caps off one pound two ounces about with the caps on it's 546 grams or one pound
three ounces okay the sigma 15 f 2.8 diagonal fish fisheye that would be a diagonal fish eye on full
frame it goes for 609. it's available on canon ef nikon f sigma sa and pentax k amounts as a
non-removable lens shade has mix of plastic and metal parts so it's a it's very lightweight and
small um it has both auto focus and manual focus with a switch on the side uh the aperture control
is controlled by the camera and so it just has the focus ring for manual focusing it measures uh 89
millimeters with caps on 75 millimeters across the front cap 68 millimeters long with caps
off 338 grams with caps off 12 or 12 ounces and 384 grams or 14 ounces with the caps on okay
next up we have the sigma eight millimeter f 3.5 circular fisheye retails new for 899.
It has
autofocus or manual focus just like the last sigma it has a manual focusing ring it measures 95
millimeters with caps on 77 millimeters across 66 millimeters from front element to flange
and 394 grams without caps or 14 ounces and then 482 grams or one pound one ounce with
caps on okay last lens is the set canon eight to fifteen f4 l zoom lens this is the only zoom lens
i tested it's just something i've always wanted to try out um it is a circular fisheye at eight
millimeters on full frame or a diagonal fish eye at 15 millimeters it has a removable um lens shade
that you would want to remove at eight millimeters on full frame the the zoom ring is down
here at the bottom of the lens and the manual focus ring is more towards the top
it is 108 millimeters tall with caps on set 90 millimeters across 82 millimeters from
flange to the front lens 530 grams without caps or one point one pound three ounces 584
grams or one pound five ounces with caps on okay next we're actually going to look at
some star tests here are the details for how i conducted these star tests you can pause the video
and read through this but the basic gist of it is they were all done with the same conditions on new
moon from a portal 3 site with the same equipment okay first up we have the opteka like i mentioned
i was not able to properly focus this lens so all the test results came out out of focus it
would not focus to infinity it reminds me of an an older lens i had called the lensbaby circular
fisheye that had sort of the same problem and so you can't really tell much about the star
distortion like coma or chromatic aberration when the stars are out of focus that said it you
know if you don't zoom in it looks fine i think because these shots of course are so wide field so
it's really up to you whether this focusing issue is a is a huge problem and of course you may get
a copy and the focus might be okay it might be a copy to copy variation thing okay the next least
expensive lens remember this one is only 215.
This tt artisan 11 millimeters f 2.8 um and at f 2.8 it
looked pretty good um but then at f 3.5 it really sharpened up and looked great in all corners edges
and center so i would probably use it at f 3.5 because it didn't improve much from f 3.5 up to f
5.6 okay next up we have the sigma 15 millimeter this had some substantial vignetting and
other issues including pretty heavy uh coma even at f 5.6 here's the sigma 8 millimeter
circular fisheye and this lens looked pretty good even at f 3.5 but it got a little bit better
at f4 and then it didn't improve much after f4 looked pretty good from there on out the canon
8 to 15 f4 l this is at eight millimeters so all the way out and you get the circular look at
f4 through f 5.6 it looked pretty much the same all throughout there with some coma and chromatic
aberration same thing with at 15 millimeters f4 f 4.5 and f 5.6 so it all looked about the same
in terms of the star quality okay let's look at some head-to-head comparisons now so these are
center crops of just the circular fisheyes and here it's really apparent how the opteka is
suffering from that not being able to focus and also here with the corner crops we
really can't tell much about oteka's performance like i said earlier because those
stars are out of focus well we can see that both the canon 8 to 15 and the sigma 8 have you
know a little bit of chromatic aberration and coma but really not too bad could be a lot worse and
the the coma is a little bit more exaggerated on the canon compared to the sigma now let's look
at some center crops of the diagonal fish eyes they all look really good they're all pretty
sharp but when we look at the left edge here you can see that the tt artisan the
mirrorless lens but also the cheapest lens of the three i think really wins in this
in the edge test has the least amount of star distortion and coma coma is that what gives
stars instead of a circular shape more of a triangular shape and when and when it's really
exaggerated like on the sigma here on the right it's sort of a triangular shape with wings it sort
of looks like a little bird in flight um the canon uh was again did pretty well um but but not as
good i think as the tt artisan even though um it did it did have uh did do a good job with contrast
and and sharpness it it did exhibit some coma and chromatic aberration as well okay here are my
final thoughts on all this i was really happily surprised by the tt artisan at only 215 dollars
it really shows the promise of these mirrorless lens designs you can't adapt a mirrorless
lens to a dslr which is the big downside so i think something like 90 percent of all camera
you know advanced camera users are still using dslrs and not mirrorless cameras so um it does
limit the potential but i think mirrorless is the future so i'm really excited by how well that
lens did for especially considering the price next up is the sigma eight millimeter circular
fisheye this is a lens i already owned i bought it used for about five hundred dollars and i was i
was pleased by its performance it's not perfect um but it's it's quite good for a circular fisheye
lens and and probably uh slightly better than the canon in terms of uh performance on stars
after that we have opteka this one was only 150 so i didn't expect much but uh the frustrating
thing is just like my lensbaby that i used to have which was like a 300 lens it didn't focus properly
to infinity i was reading this article online um about how to maybe fix this in these cheaper
fisheye lenses how to open them up and just change the focal distance yourself to try to fix the
manual focus issue and so i'm going to try that with the subtecha since i wanted to see if i can
make it work to finish these star tests with it uh then we have the sigma 15 millimeter diagonal
fish eye i was a little bit disappointed with this one um it was nice and bright but uh the star
distortion the coma especially towards the edges of the frame were really pretty bad um when you
get the sort of bird's eye bird's wing flaring on the stars that's uh that's a pretty bad coma
and then finally this canon 8-15 this is a f4 lens so a little bit slower if you weren't if
you didn't have tracking i probably you know wouldn't recommend this one because it's a little
bit of a slower lens and it's also very expensive um but it is cool that it combines if you
have a full-frame camera a circular fish-eye and a diagonal fish-eye lens into one lens so that
sort of gives you more creative potential with it and it the performance was quite good of course
but it was also very expensive lens at 1300 okay so all these reviews um are going to be
available in text form on astrolenses.com so you can head over there to download pictures or
read about these and you can also follow the links on that site to purchase them through my affiliate
links i'm just going to leave you with a processed photo since we've been looking at single exposures
this is a stack of a couple hours of exposures just to show you the potential um of a fisheye
lens uh and this was done with my sigma eight millimeter and uh my canon ra and some different
filters and uh lastly i just want to thank all of my patrons over on patreon i couldn't have
done this video without you because um you're helping finance this channel and lets
me do cool things like renting and buying uh equipment in this case lenses to try
out and review which i'm really enjoying so here's uh to all of my patrons you're about to
see all their names in the credits right now until next time this is Nico
Carver from nebulaphotos.com
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