Looking for advice on moving to FF

14 hours ago, korn said:

Thank you all who are contributing to this thread.  I'm learning a lot, and it is very helpful.

I'm excited to learn about Nauticam's announced WACP-2 lens, that appears to do two very interesting things: (1) working with high quality lenses vs. being size limited to kit lenses; and (2) working as well in air to support split scenes.  

I'm curious how much of the argument for a fisheye lens is about FOV vs. being about working with splits.  My 8mm Panasonic m34 fisheye has too often yielded photos I wasn't happy with because of distortion (e.g. the supports of a pier, or large animals like whale sharks).  Has anyone on this thread seen the new WACP-2?  Is it significantly larger/more bulky than a dome port?

Thanks again!

If you look at the pics on Nauticam's page you could scale it assuming an N120 mount, so the mount would be 120mm diameter approx.  This would mean the dome dia. would be 200-240mm.  The MRSP is quoted as $5-7,000 USD. so not cheap!   They are talking about a floatation collar so a bigger concern might be weight?

There have been discussions in other threads about what the actual field of view obtained from WWL and WACP  and the conclusion there was that they produced barrel distortion and is close to a fisheye and it extended the diagonal field of view more so than the horizontal and vertical, so for example with the WWL-1 the 130 deg file dof view ends up being equivalent to a 10mm rectilinear lens on the diagonal but on the horizontal it is equivalent to 14mm.  This link explains:  https://interceptor121.com/2019/05/  That is not to say it is bad just to know what you will get with the optics.

The WACP-2 may or may not do this, it's designed to work with 14-16mm lens rather than 28mm lenses and is only 0.82x (instead of .36x of WACP and WWL).   Probably need to wait to see what it actually delivers, in terms of distortion.

@ChrisRoss is I believe correct in terms of cost weight it will not be light.

With regards to the FOV as I wrote that post after realising myself what was going on with the WWL-1 we need to take into account that wet lenses or water contact optics are not directly comparable to a rectilinear lens 

First and foremost because any water contact optics is NOT rectilinear it will have extensive barrel distortion. So the competitor of such lens is a zoom fisheye however in the full frame camp this options has been missing. You can use a fisheye or a fisheye with a teleconverter no zooming. The reason why those lenses appear sharp in the corners is because the corners are compressed is like looking to a pincushion image and compressing it into the frame. So despite all claims from nauticam you can't really put a resolution chart in the corner and measure resolution because the chart is distorted, this may as well be acceptable depending on personal taste.

I want to say though that for those who like genuine rectilinear sea and sea makes lens correctors that seem to work well with 16-35 mm lenses. This is probably the widest you want to go before you incur perspective distortion and make things better around two stops.

The WACP fills a gap between your 15 mm fisheye and the 16-35 mm rectilinear working like a 10-25 mm fisheye but is not a replacement for a rectilinear lens. 

Looking at the WACP 2 on the 16-35mm it shows a fov of 128 degrees compared to the 108 degrees of the lens alone. I would no be suprised that the FOV improvement is almost all on the diagonal and the image does not look rectilinear anymore

At the end the FOV on the diagonal matters little because the corners are compressed they look sharp or not there is nothing interesting there the subject is in the centre. 

Going back to split shots all the shots you see are done with a fisheye. I do not like them, actually the line of the horizon bent by the lens is plain ugly and when i show a split to a normal person they say there is something wrong with it 

So I started shooting them with a rectilinear lens however this means pretty much f/22 on a full frame unsure if this is practical!