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Chinese lens manufacturer Kipon has announced that next year it will make available a reducing adapter that’s designed to allow medium format lenses to fit on full frame cameras. The adapter will have a magnification factor of 0.7x which it says will both widen the effective focal length of the lens in use and widen its effective aperture.
The first adapter will be designed to mount Hasselblad lenses on Sony E-mount cameras, but the company says it is working on other mounts for a wider range of both lenses and host cameras.
The lenses in the adapter channel the light from the exit element to create a tighter covering circle. This means light that would otherwise fall outside the sensor area is directed to land on it to be recorded.
When a 50mm Hasselblad lens is mounted on a current Hasselblad digital body it produces a similar image area to a 35mm lens on a full-frame camera. That calculation though is a factor of the sensor size of the Hasselblad camera, and the same lens would not deliver that apparent angle of view were it mounted on a full frame camera or in front of the 6x6cm film frames Hasselblad lenses were designed to be used with.
The 0.7x magnification of the Kipon adapter has the effect of canceling out the crop factor, turning that 50mm Hasselblad lens back into a 35mm-equivalent on a full-frame camera.
The adapter will have to be very good quality to make the most of the resolution of Hasselblad lenses, otherwise the exercise will be a bit pointless. It is expected to retail for $ 415 when it becomes available in February.
For more information visit the Kipon website.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)