zoom lens

I have a canon g1 and I want to buy a good powerful zoom lens.

Any Advice as to:

lenses
brands
web sites

I looked at the lensmate page but they seemed to have macro lenses... Is this correct?

Cheers

hi cullen,
I am new to all this BUT from what i understand the telephoto lens of choice for the discriminating G1 owner is the Oly b-300 mentionedin another thread in this G1 forum..

Please, more experienced members don't heitate to set me straight if i got it wrong! I guess i am also assumeing that a telephoto lens is the same as a zoom lens?

lol

i'll shut up and listen now

I'm fairly certain that the Canon 1.5x supplementary lens and the Olympus 1.7x are the only telephoto adapters available. There may be other cheap third party lenses out there, but why waste money there? You can pretty much guarantee that the Canon and Oly lenses are of far better quality.

The built in zoom capabilities continue to work with the adapters, but it is not the same as a zoom lens on a film camera.

The built in lens is a 7-21mm lens. Using the Canon 1.5x supplementary gives you a lens that is 10.5-31.5mm. The Olympus of course gives you a bit more since it's a 1.7x.

Note that you MUST buy the Canon lens adaptor to mount either the wide angle or telephoto supplementary lenses to the camera. It runs about 20 bucks and is very nice.

Unfortunately neither 1.5x or 1.7x is much of a telephoto, don't expect a huge change in your focal length.

Thanking you!

When you have 1.7x on the 7- 21 mm lens, I presume that it multiplies the size of the image by 1.7... hence not quite twice as big.

Is there a way I can relate that to a regular slr or compact camera lens.

For example how would it relate to my yashica 120mm compact camera?

The 35mm equivalent of the G1's lens is 35-105mm. Adding the B300 would make that 60-180 (approximately.)

Todd

So does this hold true

if you had a 50mm lens, with a x2 converter, you would have a 100mm lens

or in my case, the exact equivelent with a x1.7 telephoto adapter

a 35 mm to 105 mm lens with a x1.7 adapter would be

(35x1.7=59.5
105x1.7= 178.5)

a 59.5 mm to 178.5 mm lens.

Thank you for explaining this.

Yes, that's exactly correct.

Todd, thanks for the focal length equivilents, that's handy info.

I'm not certain about the Canon telephoto adapter, but the B-300 can only be used at full zoom (21 mm). Anything less and there is extreme vignetting.

Ah. Yes, forgot about that aspect. The Canon adapter gives you approximately half the zoom range before vignetting. Perhaps a bit less than half.

What does vignetting mean?

I looked it up in the dictionary but was none the wiser!

Vignetting means that the edges of the lens itself shows up in the corners of the picture. It manifests itself as darkness in the corners. Think of it this way -- if you took a picture through a toilet paper tube, you would get extreme vignetting to the point of seeing a circle in the middle surrounded by black. The shorter the tube, the less black you will see...

That make sense???

Todd

Thank you