Forum/thread	Message
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 11 Mar 2008 at 4:24 GMT go to thread Doug, I didn't use any special software. It was JPG out of the camera. I did turn up the JPG saturation in the camera a bit to make the color pop. Though the sky is a little too blue, but the grass and the color of the flowers are not that far from what you see in Southern California during this time of the year. The tempeature today is 75F (or about 24C). Alex alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 11 Mar 2008 at 1:21 GMT go to thread Hi All, I've just loaded some panos to the Panoguide Gallery taken under the bright sunshine in Southern California to check out the flare performance. Please let me know your comments. Cheers ! Alex alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 3 Mar 2008 at 0:03 GMT go to thread Doug, The entrance pupil of all fisheye lens or adapters shifts with the field angle. In your case, I believe the shift is on the order of a few millimeters. This is a small shift relative to the typical object distance you are dealing with. Therefore the effect can be minimal or ignored. Plus some of the software blending techniques are pretty clever and they can mask or hide some of the parallax errors. It sounds like you can live with this kind of imperfections for your applications. Alex alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 2 Mar 2008 at 18:54 GMT go to thread John, You are absolutely correct in saying that what we want is the entrance position position at off-axis angles not the nodal point. From optical design point of view, it is possible to keep the entrance pupil at the same z-distance for narrower angle lenses. However when the FOV required gets high, the front lens group must distort the pupil in order to capture light from such extreme angles. I agree that it is impossible to design a perfect 3 shot rotator. The "Smart blend" plug-in seems to overcome this difficulty in software. I do not know exactly the principle behind this plug-in. What is your experience with it ? Alex alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 2 Mar 2008 at 15:05 GMT go to thread Hi, The dinning room is actually one of the several 2-shot samples. Good pick! If you look at the nadir, you will be able to tell right away which one is 2-shot. Since I do not have a 2-shot rotator, I had to be a little creative with my 3-shot rotator. The tripod I used has a rotation head. So once I'm done with the rotator for 3-shots, I rotated the tripod head 180 deg to get the fourth shot. I took a total of four images at each location. I used image 1, 2 and 3 for 3-shot stitching and 1 and 4 for 2-shot (I believe that you can also use all four images to do a 4-shot if you need extra quality or the 2 and 3 shots do not work out well). I admitted that the 2-shot setup is not ideal because the nodal point is optimized for 3-shots. However, the end result proves that the 2- and 3-shot samples are acceptable for the intended market. Alex alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 2 Mar 2008 at 4:49 GMT updated: 2 Mar 2008 at 5:19 GMT go to thread Doug, Some of the house panos are actually made from 2-shots. Did you see them ? Anyway, sounds like your mind is made up. So I won't try to convince you otherwise. I just to give some background of why we decided to develop the Superfisheye given that there are other excellent products out there already. Our goals were to provide high image quality in a simple-to-use product. The lens and rotator were designed such that there is very little chance that something will go wrong out in the field. Basically we want to make the pano-taking process as simple and reliable as possible. I own a Sigma 8mm F/4, NN3 and Nikon FC-E9. I've used them all. For the Sigma, what I found was that the image quality is generally not optimal until you stop down the lens to about F/11 (do not stop down any further you will run into diffraction problem). Also the AF is unreliable. It misses the correct focus often enought I decided to put the lens in manual focus mode. Given the short focal length of the circular fisheye lens for APS-C DSLRs, there is no need for AF because the depth of the lens is so long even at reasonably wide apertures. AF only introduces potential user errors and unnecessary complexity to the lens design. So we decided to go for a fixed focus design with the hyperfocal distance optimized for most applications. Because of the long depth of field, even the variable aperture is of questionable value. With a regular lens, you stop down the aperture to gain additonal depth of field. If the depth of field is already so long, why both stop down at all if the optics is sufficiently sharp ? With the most DSLRs, you can always increase the ISO or increase the exposure time so there is rarely a need to increase the aperture. Given the short focal length, the camera hand shake is rarely a problem. You can safely take picture down to 1/8th sec. So we decided that the most important thing is to achieve high MTF at an optimal aperture value not to worry about how the lens behaves at other apertures. Again, by fixing the aperture, we have eliminated another potential user error. Now on to the rotator, we decided again that we must provide a simple to use rotator with the NPP already optimized at the factory. So there is no chance something can go wrong in the field. Our solution will save you time and it minimizes potential errors when you must shoot in a stressful environment within a limited time window (Like what I had experienced today in the model house). So you have to decide what the increased reliability is worth to you in your line of work, and how much you value your time. I would argue that you can easily make back the $140 given the labor rates in US. Again, I just want to give you my opinoin based on what I know and have experienced. Good luck with your choice. Alex alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 2 Mar 2008 at 0:34 GMT go to thread Hi, I want to get a feel for what's required to create real estate virtual tours from a practical point of view. So I went to a local model home and did some 2- and 3-shot panos with our Superfisheye and 3-shot rotator on Canon 40D. I took 4 images at each point for about 20 total. It took me about 30 to 45 mins to do all the shooting. I've uploaded these panos on our site www.sunex.com/dslr/virtualtour.htm for your review. Please let me know what you real estate photo experts think. Alex alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 29 Feb 2008 at 20:35 GMT go to thread Hi Michel, Very interesting article. BTW, for your tight space shots, you may consider our miniature fisheye lens (DSL215) manually mounted on a compact PS camera. I've made a prototype camera myself a while ago. It worked reasonably well. Our recent 2-shot samples (www.sunex.com/dslr/virtualtour.htm) are much improved though still "not perfect" at the stitching seam. Based on my investigation, I believe that the following factors account for difference between 2 and 3-shots: (1) You need a precision 2-shot rotator with the correct NP position, as you've noted in your article. (2) The stitching software must be improved to compensate for the lens mapping function correctly, especially near the edge of the image circle. The PTGui with its many coefficients has the potential to do so. But it requires experimentation, skill and knowledge of the software. (3) The vignetting near 185 deg needs to be minimized, or can this be compensated by a more clever "blending" plug-in ? We are committed to further improve the 2-shot solution. Working with our partners, we will be looking from both software and hardware angles. Stay tuned. Alex alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 29 Feb 2008 at 3:41 GMT go to thread Hi Everyone, I've uploaded some new 2-shot and 3-shot panos on our website (www.sunex.com/dslr/virtualtour.htm). Please check them out and let me know your comments. I understand that the 2-shot is more elegant intellectually. However practically speaking, the 3-shot is equally easy and quick (just a few more seconds required to rotate the camera and take another image). The stitching process for 3-shot is easier and more reliable using most stitching programs that I've tried and, the output quality of 3-shot is better. Alex alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 29 Feb 2008 at 3:14 GMT go to thread Mike, I used a Canon 40D, and our 3 shot rotator. The rotator is designed to align the 3-shot NP to the rotation axis. There is no need to calibrate for NP position. You can order a lens and the 3 shot rotator at www.superfisheye.com. Alex alert moderator
Forum: Q & A Thread: Choosing between Sigma 8 or 4,5mm Fisheye	Re: Choosing between Sigma 8 or 4,5mm Fisheye Posted: 27 Feb 2008 at 14:58 GMT go to thread I work for Sunex. I've done a competitive analysis between our SuperFisheye and Sigma 4.5mm lens from optical point of view. Smooth is correct that the image circle of the Sigma 4.5mm is only 12.5mm vs. 14.5mm for the Superfisheye. This means that Superfisheye captures 33% more pixels on the same camera. Here is an example of what you get on D300. "www.sunex.com/dslr/indoor2.jpg" alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 24 Feb 2008 at 21:10 GMT updated: 24 Feb 2008 at 21:14 GMT go to thread Hi John, Thanks for the tips. I've recently discovered that the Nikon D300 outputs JPG files without much chromatic aberration. I believe that when it converts RAW into JPG in the camera, it applies chromatic correction. Check this image out: "www.sunex.com/dslr/indoor2.jpg" Cheers ! alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 24 Feb 2008 at 21:05 GMT go to thread Doug, All your experimental observation is consistent with the fact that our 3-shot rotator positions the pivotal point too far behind the nodal point for a proper 2-shot. It is just the nature of the fisheye lens optics. Our 4-position rotator will address this issue. Please email me any images that you think may be useful to us. Alex alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 24 Feb 2008 at 15:45 GMT go to thread Hi John, Thanks for the file. I'm impressed. What lens parameters did you use in PTgui ? I want to try myself. Would it be possible to improve the "seam shadow" that you and Doug have noticed by using a different blending method ? I know Realviz offers this options. I'm not familiar with PTgui or IPIX to know if this is also a possibility. Alex alert moderator
Forum: Commercial Announce Thread: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV	Re: SUNEX Lauches new circular fisheye lens for 1.6x/1.5x DSLRs with 185deg FOV Posted: 24 Feb 2008 at 6:35 GMT go to thread Hi Doug, Thanks for the MOV file. Your comment about the nodal to pivotal point makes sense since the nodal point for 3-shot is recessed deeper into the lens than that for 2-shot. This nodal point difference will be accounted for in the 4-position rotator design. I'll play with the NN next week to see what I can do in the interim. Alex alert moderator