Canon 250D 58mm Close-up Lens for A700, A710IS, G1, G2, G3, G5, G6 & EOS SLR Cameras

I am new to photography and wanted to jump into every aspect of it. I bought a high end lens to work with everyday pictures but after looking at some up close photos wanted to try that. I bought this lens to attach it to the 50mm lens....I love it. It allows me to get much closer to the subject. Well worth the money in my opinion!

I bought the Canon 250D expecting it to be a good alternative to an expensive lens. I use it with my E-300 Olympus camera and the 40/150mm lens. It requires a little work to get a proper focus, but when you have it, the results are superlative. I recommend it highly.

I bought this close up lens to use on my Olympus E510 telephoto kit lens to give it closer focusing. The lens works quite well with the 40-150mm kit lens.

At 150mm focal length, you can almost fill the frame vertically with a US nickel...maybe a mm of blank space at top and bottom of the frame. I am not real good at the calculations but I think that would be close to 1:1 in 35mm equivalence.

I really haven't noticed a drop off in image quality with the lens. DOF will, of course, be quite shallow so you will want to stop down a bit and probably use a tripod. Working distance from the end of the lens is about 8-9 inches. That is enough that you would have no problems with using natural light on inanimate objects or using a flash off camera. Even insects that are not real spastic should be ok.

I also tried the lens on the 14-42mm kit lens but that lens already focuses quite close and adding the 250D to it does not improve it much. Very slight increase in magnification. So, if that is your only kit lens, I would not bother adding the 250D to it. But, for the telephoto kit lens, I am quite happy with this close up lens.

I use this lens with the Canon A710IS. It turns out, this is a pretty generic closeup lens (not specific to the Canon compact digicams); it is compatible with a lot of lenses. It works fine with the full 6x zoom on this camera (210 mm equivalent).

With natural lighting, this lens gives great results. At closest focus with max zoom (about 7 inches), the field of view is about 1.4 inches across (compared to around 7.5 inches across at same distance without the lens, where you'd have to use 1x; or, with 6x zoom, you'd get about 4.1 inches across at closest focus, about 22 inches away). The result can be stunning detail of small critters. I take a lot of small-critter close-ups, and I find this lens most useful for the skittish ones (spiders, flies, butterflies). But if the subject will hold still for you, you can do better without this lens, using 1x (no zoom), with a field of view about 1 inch across at about 1/2 inch from the subject; but, at that distance you often have a problem with the lens casting a shadow over the subject. Bottom line: If you have the Canon A710IS or similar camera this lens makes a huge difference and is well worth the money (especially with the A710IS where closeup ability is the greatest weakness).

I use this lens only with maximum zoom setting. If you go down to 1x (35 mm equiv.) this camera lets you go into macro mode, but it gives a field of view about 2.1 inches across at 1/2 inch from the subject. Not good!

A word of caution. After blowing a bunch of photos using this lens, I figured out that even if the camera shows you a green "OK focused" signal, it will *still* be blurry unless you hold the camera between about 7 and 10 inches from the subject. So, in practice, you will want to take several shots at different distances to make sure you get within the zone where focus is sharp. Also, it is very hard to see if you have the right parts of the critter in focus, so throw in a few extra shots for that too. But, it is all worth it to get a couple of sharp close-ups. One thing that helps is the relatively speedy focus of this camera, so you can take the shot before your hand sways out of the plane of focus.

There is no vignetting whatsoever with this lens at any zoom setting (unlike the 1.75x teleconverter). However, a rather significant drawback is the shadowing the adapter causes in flash photos. It is not a sharp-edged shadow, in fact it creates more of a linear gradient, darkest at lower right and brightest at top left. Happily, many closeups will be of tiny subjects anyway that still occupy only a small portion of the image, so once you crop the image, the shadowing gradient is pretty subtle. I got several excellent photos of this kind already. However, when you want to keep the whole image (e.g. a close-up of lichens over a rock), the shadowing will ruin the photo, unless perhaps used as an added subtle fill-flash. This is a shame, because with a working distance of 7-10 inches provided by this lens, you could imagine some really great flash photography otherwise. (Normally the problem with flash with point-and-shoot close-ups is it is too bright.)

The most convenient way to use this lens will be keeping it threaded onto the adapter already; you can then pop the whole thing on and off the camera very quickly. Unfortunately, only a standard filter-box is provided with this lens so you'd need to find a larger container to hold it together with the adapter.

Incidentally, if you try (carefully, loosely!! so the lenses don't touch) combining this lens with the 1.75x teleconverter for the A710IS, the results are: Field of view about 3 inches across at 31 inches distance (farthest), or 2.5 inches across at 19 inches distance (closest focus). Probably not worth doing.

One nice feature of this closeup lens is it has 58 mm threads on both sides, so you can add a polarizing or other filter on top. In fact, once you have the $20 adapter that is required for this lens (for A710IS), you can add 58mm filters for everyday use even when not using add-on lenses -- that was a nice surprise!

This is great for close-ups, I am using on my Powershot A610, I recommend this for anyone.