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There aren't too many lens adapters that catch our eye, but the $600 Metabones Speedbooster has so many tricks up its sleeve that we can see it tempting a lot of serious NEX camera users -- like us. Big words, but what it purports to do is nothing short of mind-boggling. First off, it adapts your Canon EF (full-frame) lenses to E-Mount, which is nice enough since there's still a paucity of high-end glass for NEX users. But it gets better: the Speedbooster also makes your lens wider by a factor of 0.71x, shrinking an 85mm lens to 59mm, for instance -- effectively making your NEX nearly full-frame. Other adapters can do some of that, but its final trick is the piece de resistance: increasing the speed of a lens by a full stop. That may sound impossible, but it apparently works by concentrating the extra light-gathering area of a full-frame lens down to the smaller E-mount sensor area, turning an f4.0 lens into an f2.8 lens, for instance. The adapter allegedly increases sharpness on top of all that, and brings "auto-aperture, image stablization, EXIF and (slow) autofocus support," for late model EF lenses, according to Metabones.
Skepticism reigns until we can scope it for ourselves, but the adapter came out shining on Philip Bloom's video and photo tests so far, judging by his samples (below the break). The $600 price tag will likely dissuade casual users, but light-deprived indoor shooters (like us) or those shopping for new glass -- who already have a bagful of EF-lenses -- might take to it like a sugar addict to Trix. Metabones said they'll start shipping the Speedbooster this month, and will come out with MFT and Fuji-X mount options, along with support for lenses from Nikon and Leica, among others. Check the source to see how to grab it, but the line forms behind us.
Continue reading Metabones Speedbooster promises faster EF lenses when mounted on NEX cameras
Filed under: Cameras
Via: Philip Bloom
Source: Metabones
As we learned pretty quickly when the iPhone 4 introduced the Retina display to the world, all those pixels are pretty useless without apps that can truly take advantage. Thankfully, Apple wasn't about to leave the stage today without delivering the goods for its next gen MacBook Pros. In addition to all the stock apps being updated, Final Cut Pro and Aperture have also gotten the appropriate boost in pixel density, allowing them to be all they can be on that 220ppi display. Which, in the case of Final Cut, means full-res 1080p video docked in a corner of the interface with all the tools exposed to your itchy editing finger. If that isn't good enough for you, Adobe is hard at work on Photoshop and Autodesk will be delivering an update to AutoCAD as well. And, in case you're worried that all work and no play makes Tim Cook a dull boy, Diablo 3 has also been updated, instantly making the Mac our favorite platform to farm low level baddies for gold on.
For more coverage of the WWDC 2012 keynote, head over to our liveblog!
Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Aperture, AutoCAD and more score Retina Display support originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Jun 2012 13:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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