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