Hdx200 adapters?

Question

i was wondering .. what adapters are out there for the hdx 200, is the letus 35mm adapter good for all lenses? how does it work? thanks

Answer 1

There are several choices when it comes to choosing a 35mm adapter, especially for the HVX200, but you may have already come across the best one. Others include the Redrock M2 Adapter or the Cinevate Brevis. The ones by Redrock Micro are very popular-- I have used them on HVXs before, but I think the Letus ones are better for 2 reasons:

   1) When using the Letus adapters, your footage suffers the least amount of light loss of any 35mm adapter out there. With the Redrock or any other one, it can get pretty tough in low-light situations

   2) Most 35mm adapters flip the image up-side down. Naturally, you can fix this in post production by re-flipping the image (or film with the camera upside down, but that's kinda silly), so it's not that much of a problem, it's just a pain. The Letus adapter, however, re-reflips the image so its right side up again.  

How does it work? Well, the 35mm adapter connects to your camera's existing lens and then on the other end, has a lens mount for mounting additional lenses. You have a choice of buying a lens mount that accepts inexpensive 35mm photo lenses (remember those things?) or the higher end PL mount for pro movie-like lenses, that are quite a bit more expensive.

So, no it does NOT work with all lenses, you have a choice between the fancy-pants movie lenses, like Zeiss of Cooke ones or whatever, or the cheaper 35mm photo lenses from 35mm SLR cameras. There are some really nice and cheap Canon FD lenses on eBay. I have a couple sitting in my closet from my parent's old Canon AE-1, so they are real easy to get your hands on. I bet there are cheap Nikon ones too.

         When using the adapter, your footage will get a nicer, narrower depth of field (less of the frame is in focus, so you can be real artsy, having the background out of focus, but the foreground in focus, or something like that. It makes your footage look like film, like the 35mm film used in movies. You can try to do this effect without an adapter too, however, just place your camera further back from your subject, and zoom in more (the more you are zoomed in, the less of your picture will be in focus). Oh, and it also helps to open up the aperture all the way (or at least f2). The lower the f-stop reading, the lower the depth of field. Of course, a low f-stop will make your picture too bright, right? So to compensate, turn on an ND filter, or turn the shutterspeed up to 1/200 or something (the ND filter would probably work better)

Well, I hope that helps....   :-)