An alternative to IBIS

An alternative to IBIS

For some reason, there are always loud advocates for image stabilisation on the sensor in the camps of Fuji, Canon and Nikon. For certain reasons these companies are not yet interested in the tech. I am with the companies on this , i think there are a lot better things to put time and resources into when there is even better stabilised lenses to get when i need them. With that said, there is one product i'd love to see.

Those of you that are old enough to remember the auto focus introduction in SLR:s in the 80:s would remember the TC-16A from Nikon.

Someone at Nikon came up with the idea that people would like to use their old manual focus lenses with autofocus. Not a bad thought, i might add. Sadly it was hampered by the fact that every lens turned into a 1.6 times longer lens, very much like if you had put them on a half frame camera. Nevertheless Nikon sold their fair share of TC-16A:s and some people still buy them today on the second hand market.

Quite a few years later, Metabones came up with a similar idea. With lots of mirrorless cameras on the market with aps-c or smaller cameras lots of people tend to want to use their SLR glass on their new cameras. There are only three problems.

1. A regular SLR lens has 1.5 times narrower (measured in mm) field of view on a aps-c sensor than they were made for.
2. A lens made to cover 24x36mm film lose half its resolving power on an aps-c sensor.
3. The flange distance will still be the same. Thus the adapter has to be a long tube making the lens+adapter very large on an short flanged and small mirrorless camera.
   
   
   Metabones managed to almost completely overcome these problems with their speed booster. 

It works more or less like a magnifier. If you put it on the camera and look into it, you see a sensor the size of 24x36 mm instead of the 18x24 mm sensor that is really there. All the light from the adapted lens is thus gathered with all of the lenses resolving power preserved. For sure, there is a loss of quality by going through the extra lens elements, but it is a lot less than only using half of the lens.

Now back to our Fuji cameras. What if we had a combination of the speedbooster and the TC-16A. A Fuji made focal length reducer with a floating element for autofocus and image stabilisation with a canon FD mount in the front. The relatively short register of the FD mount and the lock ring that tightens the mount very hard allows for adapters to be fitted to mount almost any SLR lens. We would be able to use our Canon FL, FD, EOS, Nikon F, Pentax K, M42, old Fujica X and even Leica R lenses with both image stabilisation and auto focus. A Metabones speedbooster is expensive and a Fuji made focal lenght reduser with that kind of capability would at least be twice the price. But there is no doubt i would cash up for it even if i had to sell one of my beloved cameras to afford it.

And let's not forget the best part. We can show it up the throat of those "I need IBIS to take good photographs"-whiners.