Olympus C3000, PT-010 and Sea&Sea wide angle

The Olympus C3000's standard lens has a maxium wide angle of 32mm equivalent. Although already reasonable, the possibilities of an additonal wide angle lens looked promising enough to buy the Sea&Sea 0.56x wide angle lens. Below is a summary of the results.

Standard lens

Photo 1 - C3000 at 32mm in PT-010:

Pay attention to the tiles on this photo: the Olympus lens "suffers" from barrel distortion causing the straight lines to appear as curves.

Using the Sea&Sea 0.56x wide angle

The Sea&Sea 0.56x wide angle is especially designed for underwater use with digital cameras. It has a threaded mount so it can be attached directly to a variety of housings such as the Olympus PT range.

As was to be expected from the specified 0.56x, the lens provides an angle of around 80 degrees when the camera is on 32mm. But the black corners in the photo are not the desired result. This is the result of mechanical vignetting: the view in the corners is blocked by the rims of the wide angle lens.

Photo 2 - C3000 at 32mm with Sea&Sea wide angle:

Also pay attention to the irregular corners, apparently the camera lens is not fully centered in the housing. Under normal circumstances this is no problem, and I only discovered this when I started to use the wide angle lens.

Zooming in to around 48mm removes the black corners and leaves an angle of view of around 58 degrees. Although the effect of the wide angle is now reduced, the gain is still more than 25% compared to the 46 degrees of the standard lens.

Photo 3 - C3000 at 48mm with Sea&Sea wide angle:

A striking difference compared to photo 1 are the straight lines of the tiles. Apparently the lens corrects the barrel distortion of the camera's lens completely.

Conclusion

The C3000 underwater viewing angle is significally improved by the Sea&Sea lens. But it is a bit disappointing that the vignetting prevents good results at angles greater than 58 degrees.

Personally I am still satisfied with the lens as the increase in view angle is enough to create nicer close-ups by allowing me to get just that little closer to a subject.

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