This lens is an interesting surprise. Sometimes you don't have to play the "you get what you pay for" game. While it has a lot of barrel distortion and chromatic-aberrations at its widest-angle use, it is an exceptional performer for those shots where Sony's lowest zoom setting leaves off. The multitude of variables involved when trying to tackle a test like this is overwhelming -- focal lengths, distance to subject, f/stops, lighting conditions, etc. But I'll try to show the worst and best this lens has to offer. Be aware too that nearly any wide-angle lens will produce some barrel-distortion, correcting for that (and even for chromatic-aberrations) with today's photo-editing toys make it simple to get excellent photos from a lens that has a little more of these problems than others. Since I'd have to post-process any wide-angle lens this way, I don't mind pushing an adjustment slider a little more for one lens than another. However, none of the images here will have any post-processing, other than some full size crops from the original photos to highlight the defects and successes, and all crops are saved with a JPG compression of 1 in Paint Shop Pro (the least I could go).

If you get this lens and want to see how well some of the worst-case ones can "cleanup", I would recommend the Debarrelizer v2.0 plug-in from http://www.theimagingfactory.com/ You can download a demo and play with it. It has adjustments for chromatic-aberration (CA). Since I'll only be offering montages of cropped sections in this test, none will have their original center-points which makes it impossible for you to use these samples for that.

When 0.25x does NOT equal 0.25x!

When starting on the test photos below, I discovered an interesting thing. When taking the test shots I always tried to get one shot that would be a field-of-view equivalent to the Sony's own widest-angle (by zooming in far enough) so that I could compare it right up to where the F717 could pick up on its own. When running the data through EXIFER software, I couldn't get the conversion numbers to work to get the 35mm equivalents, just by using Sony's lens focal length conversion number multiplied by 0.25. They wouldn't match up to the same 38mm field of view through the Pro Optic as Sony's lens. What I found is that this lens is actually a 0.33x lens. To go from Sony's focal length to a 35mm-equivalent, you multiply the Sony EXIF focal-length number by 3.9175258. To go from F717 + Pro Optic's 0.25x, I had to multiply Sony's EXIF number by 1.2833274. Working the math in reverse this brought this lens to 0.33x (or close enough to that). So much for "Truth in Advertising", eh?

With all these drawbacks from what was advertised I'm still not disappointed though, not for that price. And as you'll soon see, you can get some really decent performance within some of Sony's zoom range. My only other option was to find a supplier for the $360-$400 Raynox fisheye lens. They were out of stock everywhere at the time that I pursued getting a wide-angle fish-eye lens, even Raynox's main distributors were out. In many ways I'm glad of that or I never would have taken the risk on this under-dog from the price-pound that can do some pretty fancy tricks. (Then too, I'm always the sap for wanting to love and give a home to a sad little mutt that everyone else would abandon. :-)

FOV and Performance Examples

The main scene I chose for these tests lacks in a lot of respects, indirect lighting, no real high-contrast points, etc., but I tried to pick an area nearby that had strong parallel lines and some widely spaced details to better show any CA (chromatic-aberrations) in such wide-angle shots. (I live in a remote country location, I'm not about to drive 4 hours to a city just to find brick walls for you. :-) I should have hung more things on this wall but ... hey, I'm a busy boy! Wha'dya want for free? In the un-retouched crops I'll try to choose areas of the photos that show off the worst-case scenarios, and those that are successes when trying to show that too.

All photos are taken with a sharpness setting of 0 (zero).
All lens focal lengths will be posted as "Native F717 lens in mm [35mm-equivalent in mm]"
Distance of lens to wall is 6-feet in all these same-subject shots.
All thumbnails (should) have the EXIF info from the original photos.

Note: That due to this unique situation with the wall in deep-shade, and a bright sky above and to the side, that it clearly shows some bad lens flare in the shape of a faint bulls-eye pattern (to annoyingly strong when the sun came out full) in the very center of many of these photos. I've never noticed this type of flare happen in images with this lens before, but it's nice to see it show up for these test photos. I doubt I'll run into unique lighting like this often, but it's nice to know what to watch out for.

UPDATE: I found out what is causing this bullseye flare in the images. I had lost this lens in a field one day, a day later I found it. It had obtained a lot of moisture inside by then. On opening it all up to clean the elements I found that the edges of the lens elements were not blackened properly. I simply took a black magic-marker and blackened all the frosted-glass sides of the lenses. Flares completely gone! 

(Ignore the color-balance and exposure shifts, I left it in auto-white-balance, and auto-exposure modes. It changed greatly depending on what was within the FOV. (Grrrrrr.. and I just found out the thumb-nailer that I was using did its own bit of adjusting on the thumbnails too (but not the photos at the very bottom). I'm too tired to redo these.))

9.7mm [12mm]

12.8mm [16mm]

16.8mm [22mm]

20.8mm [27mm]

24.1mm [31mm]

29.3mm [38mm]

39.7mm [51mm]

47mm [60mm]

9.7mm [12mm]

12.5mm [16mm]

17mm [22mm]

18.5mm [24mm]

21.8mm [28mm]

25.5mm [33mm]

29.7mm [38mm]

38.7mm [50mm]

47mm [60mm]

9.7mm [12mm]

12.4mm [16mm]

16.8mm [22mm]

18.5mm [24mm]

23.2mm [30mm]

29.7mm [38mm]

40.3mm [52mm]

48.5mm [62mm]