The practical limits of anamorphic lenses

[Scot McPhie]

I was reading in this article on anamorphic lenses the following

 

It is also worth noting that the price of these lenses is partly due to the difficulty in manufacture. An anamorphic lens uses two matched cylindrical elements, one positive and the other negative. Their spacing reduces the image horizontally from 16:9 to 4:3. Unlike a normal lens where grinding or matching errors simply cause a change of focal length which can be easily corrected by refocussing, with anamorphic adaptors any mismatch causes astigmatism which cannot be corrected and results in a different focal point for horizontal and vertical edges. Design of these non zoom-through adaptors is balanced for distant scenes and normal angles of view but their correction fails at very close distances or higher zoom. Under these conditions the only solution is to stop down the camera lens to reduce the error. Thus high zoom or close-up use in poor light must be avoided - under these conditions the built in conversion should be used but otherwise the adaptor is better. So if you want a close-up in poor light ?to catch the tear in the eye of the Bride?s mother? don?t use the adaptor!!

 

Now I'm wanting to do some shots with the Panasonic 16:9 anamorphic lense (for the DVX100) on my Beaulieu R16 on the Angeniux 10-120 zoom.

 

Just wondering how many of these observations would apply to this set up. It's probably reasonable to assume that the Panasonic 16:9 is designed also as a "non zoom through" and would also suffer from astigmatism at hese extremes. I'm going to do a number of tests to look at this - but has anyone already tried this and what are your experiences?

 

The zoom function is useful in helping get the shallow dof - but there's got to be a point where it's a trade off between that and the astigmatism becoming prevalent. I'd like to know at what focal length that becomes apparent, and what f stop for the low light close ups it becomes a problem.

 

Any experiences anyone could share would be useful.

 

Thanks

 

Scot