If you've been watching my videos lately,
then you're probably aware that I regularly use
the Metabones 0.71x Speed Booster Ultra to convert
my EF lenses to the Micro 4/3 mount found on my Pocket 4K.
In fact, that's what I'm using to film this right now.
Well, there's been some updates to that category with Metabones
releasing a speed booster specifically designed
for the Pocket 4K, and Viltrox releasing a Mark II
to their popular focal reducer as well.
So today, we're going to compare these two new units against
my previous model, and I'll even show you how to adjust the back
focus on each of them to help make your lenses more parfocal.
Let's get Undone!
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody? I'm Gerald Undone.
And RØDES? Where we're going, we don't need RØDES!
So, many of you have been asking me about
the new Metabones and what advantages it brings
when using it on your Pocket 4K, which it's specifically designed
for, and a lot of that comes down to sensor stack thickness.
In front of your camera's sensor are several layers of glass,
and this comprises the sensor stack.
It can vary in thickness depending on the model,
so some of those Micro 4/3 cameras for which the current
Micro 4/3 to EF Speed Booster was designed is for about
4mm thick sensor stack, but the one on the Pocket 4K is only
2.4mm thick and so the current gen of Speed Boosters
isn't really optimized for that sensor design.
In fact, if we compare the new Metabones
here in my hand to, well, I've got the Viltrox here.
The other one is, obviously, on the camera.
We can see, you see how raised this area is
on the Viltrox, which is for just, regular Micro 4/3
and how much more protruding the one is on the new Metabones.
This adds some restrictions meaning that you can't actually
use this one on the other Micro 4/3 cameras,
but you can use this design on both.
The only issue is that in some cases,
this design may not give you the sharpest
image possible on a camera like the Pocket 4K,
but this design can only be used on the Pocket 4K.
Now, the practical implications of this change are going
to vary a lot depending on what lens that you pair it with.
If you're using a lens that is more telecentric,
or has the exit pupil further away from the sensor,
you're not going to see as much of a difference and this
kind of makes sense because the rays are, you know,
more straight and more close together, and they'll
probably just be able to penetrate the sensor stack
without seeing much, you know, complications.
But, if your rays are coming in wider, which means that will
also apply if you use a wider maximum aperture,
then there might be some issues there where
the thicker sensor stack are going to monkey up
the rays a little bit, trying to get in on the sides.
So basically, if you're using a longer lens with a narrower
aperture, you're probably not going to see any differences,
and if you're using a wider focal length with a wider
maximum aperture, like a 20 or 24mm, let's say, like, f/1.4,
then you might notice some differences
in sharpness and this new design
will have some benefits. And I already found this to be
true with some tests that I did earlier using the Canon 100mm
Macro f/2.8, which obviously has a much
smaller aperture than f/1.4, and the 100mm
focal length made it so that there wasn't really, apparently,
any differences between the two Speed Boosters.
But today, we're going to be testing
the lens more in the middle.
We'll use the Sigma 18-35mm f/1.8,
which again, is a lens that I highly recommend
in this sort of pairing configuration anyway.
And we're going to see if that has any differences
between the new Metabones and the old one,
as well as we'll throw the Viltrox into the mix there
to see if this Speed Booster, which is only about less than
a quarter of the price of the Metabones, can keep up.
So, let's go do that now.
OK, so for the first test here,
we're just going to shoot some charts so we have
a bit of a control baseline.
But while I'm at that, I want to explain a little bit
about that parfocal thing that I was discussing,
because this Speed Booster and lens combination
is already set up because this is the one
that I've been using all along.
So this one is perfectly parfocal.
And in a previous video, when I mentioned that,
some of you were saying "I thought parfocal only applied
when you zoomed in and focused,
but not when you zoomed out."
I've been able to dial these in so it doesn't
really matter whether you focus
on the wide end or the telephoto lens,
it stays sharp all the way through.
So, if you come around here, I'll show you
using the focus peaking on the Blackmagic here.
So, if we focus the lens right here
while we're in, like, the middle of the zoom range
and then we can zoom all the way out and you see
how everything is green? That means its in focus.
I have the focus peaking to be set to green, and if we zoom
all the way in, you see how it remains in focus.
And so some people say that you can only
do that when you are doing it zoomed in and then zoom out,
if it remains in focus, but I find that it's harder
to do when you zoom out, but you can still do it so
that even when you zoom out, then when you zoom in,
it should still be able to stay in focus.
And this means that your lens
is pretty much parfocal all the way through the zoom range.
OK, so now all I'm gonna do
is just make sure the focus is good
and then record a couple of clips of this scene
with each one of the focal reducers.
[soft instrumental music]
OK, so now I'm going to switch to one of the other
Speed Boosters, and I'll give you a,
a few notes about the build quality as we do this.
So, this one is the classic EF to Micro 4/3 one,
and I think it's, it's really, really good.
I like the fit on the lens, I think it's nice and snug,
but not too much and the fit on the body is good as well.
I noticed that with the Viltrox one which,
I will put that one on next, that the fit on the lens
is really, really, really snug.
As far as the build quality, you know,
they feel about the same, like, the Viltrox one might be
a little bit lighter and maybe have, well,
it feels like metal construction all the way through.
The parts might be a little bit less
refined looking, but, I mean,
it's definitely, it looks better than four times less money.
Alright so, but when you put it on the lens, it's--
Ugh, quite solid to get it on there, which I would say is
maybe a little bit too tight, but then when you put it on
the body, which we'll do now,
it is quite a bit looser once it's on there.
It's almost as if it's a little
bit harder to get on because it,
kind of, wobbles a little bit and so,
can you see this play here?
So that might be the only real
build quality difference that I was able to detect,
is the looseness of it on the mount to the camera.
It has the same functions, like there's a function button
on the side just like with the Metabones one,
and like I said, it feels metal and looks pretty good,
but it is definitely looser on the mount.
OK, let's see if there is a reduction
in quality switching to the Viltrox one.
One thing I did notice when I switched to the Viltrox is
you see the f-number here under the IRIS category, it's f/1.2,
but when I had the other Metabones Speed Booster on,
it was f/1.3 and you can move it to f/1.3,
but it's interesting how the maximum aperture conversion
changed when using the Viltrox over the Metabones.
The lens is a f/1.8, but the adapter is supposed
to display its 0.71x conversion on it
and the Viltrox seems to round down
where the Metabones seems to round up.
OK, so now we're gonna switch to the new
Metabones one that was designed specifically for the,
uh, Pocket 4K and you can see again, this Viltrox--
is really freakin' hard to get off.
OK, so for the Pocket 4K one,
it has this little foot on here, all of them have that,
I just took them off for the Viltrox
and the original Metabones because
I was doing some autofocus tests on the GH5,
and they were hard to get on and off because of the cage
that I have on the GH5, but rest assured they all come
with the same base support here that you can use,
you know, to attach to your cage and that kind of thing.
As far as the new Metabones one,
it feels like the old one, I would say.
Pretty similar build quality, construction, look,
and everything. The main difference here is this
section that protrudes, and you know, so this goes much
deeper now into the body than the previous one did,
and this is going to help with
preventing that funny angle stuff that I was talking about
with the thinner, uh, sensor stack.
OK, so let's mount this one on.
You do need to be a little bit more careful
when handling that optic. Try not to jam it against the body
if you're going in wrong, and again, don't put that
Speed Booster on a Micro 4/3rd body that is not the Pocket 4K.
Now that we're back on a Metabones version, in this case
the specified 4K one, the IRIS is showing f/1.3 again.
So, it's only the Viltrox that has it at f/1.2.
So I'm just going to focus now and then do
the little test clip for the specified 4K Metabones,
and then we'll compare the sharpness on the computer.
OK, so now we've moved outside and I'm going to
do pretty much the same test again, but this time,
we have a branch in front of the sky, so we can
kind of see a little bit about aberration, detail,
detail throughout the frame. If there's any weirdness
going on, we should be able to capture it here,
so I'm just going to focus on the branch now.
♪
OK, so now we're going to do a little bit of autofocus tests
between the Viltrox and the old Micro 4/3.
This has nothing to do with the new Pocket 4K one, I just know
that some of you wanted to know if the new mark II Viltrox,
how it compared with the Metabones-- the classic,
uh, Micro 4/3 one, and I will let you know that I rolled back
the firmware on the Metabones one,
which we are about to see the results in a minute.
There's a new one for version 3.4 that came out at the end
of August, and I found that as soon as I put that firmware
update on, the autofocus just went in the toilet,
where with the older version, I found it more comparable with
the latest firmware version that's on the Viltrox right now.
Alright, so we're going to set this to AFC and then we're going
to put this to Face Detection and it should work.
Let's check.
[upbeat music]
♪
OK, so we're back in the studio here and I'm just going
to do a couple of more autofocus tests
just to make sure that we cover all the bases.
I'm going to switch over to the different
autofocus instead of using the face detection.
I'm going to jump over to the one area, that box,
and I've got it at about smallish size and put it in
the centre there, and we're just going
to move point to point. I've got the Viltrox on first
and then I'll switch over to Metabones. This will also
give you an opportunity to hear how much noise it's making.
I dunno if you can hear it over me right now
but it's already trying to focus in the background.
So, we'll see if it's any good
at just, kind of, like, doing some focus moves
throughout the scene. Here we go.
♪
[lens whirring]
[persistent clicking]
So, it seems to be focusing, in the sense that it is,
sort of, jumping to the object and then it does get sharp,
but there's, like, an in and out and it's rapid.
It's like "slink, slink, slink, slink, slink"
and then it finally gets in focus.
You can use it for single shot.
You could put it in, you know, AFS,
or even a manual will be better because then
it's not going to hunt. So, put it in manual,
press AF on, pfft, it'll achieve--
well, pfft pfft pfft, it'll achieve focus
and then lock off your shot, and you're good to go from there.
Or, for photos, if you're just doing like
a portrait or something.
Get the focus, then take the shot,
but anything that's moving, anything that you want to track,
it's just, it's not going to look good.
It's going to be really jarring. OK, so I want to show you one
last thing before I put the Pocket 4K back together
so that I can film the A-roll and conclusion to this video
and that has to do with adjusting that infinity focus
or back focus on these focal reducers
so that you can make your lenses more parfocal.
Now, if you're using something like the 18-35mm,
which, your copy may be different than mine,
because I heard that there is some variance in this regard.
Uh, my copy wasn't very parfocal at all, so at 18-35mm
it wouldn't maintain focus when I zoomed through.
But, I've been able to adjust all of these
to achieve, I would say, pretty darned good
parfocal-ness on the 18-35mm,
and I'll show you how I did that.
So, the first thing I would suggest that you do
is you place some marks on here so you can always reset it.
I don't know if you can see this very well,
but you see this little black magic marker here
that's lined up with this one?
This one that I've put here is, so, this is my baseline,
and then I've moved it, so there was another
one in here before on this side.
Let's see if you can-- see this one right here?
That's where it was originally. That mark
was over here, but I've turned it so that
it moved over to this side and I put a new mark in,
so this is my 18-35mm parfocal mark,
and this is my default mark, and I did that with just,
a black magic marker like this, and you can
just draw on it. And then, if you ever want to change
that or take it off, the magic marker is easy to get off.
Just use a cotton swab, this is a Q-tip, dip it in
a little bit of rubbing alcohol
and then you can just erase either the mark in there
or out here quite easily.
And then, once you have that, you know, if you want to give
yourself a safety mark, you need a tiny
little flat-head screwdriver.
You can see this one here, it's just a thin
little flat-head, and along the edge of the Metabones,
we turn until we see it,
you'll see this little recess in here,
and hopefully the light can catch that a little bit,
but right in there is a little hole that you put
the screwdriver in, and that's also what this line is for,
I guess, to let me know, I guess I should have figured that out.
But, you can just unscrew that screw like this,
and it doesn't actually come out, it just
comes, like, to the front of the hole and then is loose.
And then, you're actually able to turn this element here.
Now, again, I'm going to make sure
that I can line up my,
my black mark to that, but as you can see,
we can just turn this now.
And it makes that adjustment, and now we can
see that that black mark that originally I'd lined up
with the other one is now over here and generally,
you want to turn it probably, you can see the distance,
the one mark was here and the other mark was here.
That distance may be about, eh, I don't know,
three hours on the 12 o'clock scale,
is the one that made it parfocal for me.
I'm going to go ahead and put this back.
These go in and you tighten this up.
Now, the actual way to find your mark
is going to require trial and error.
So, you're going to have to move it a little bit,
and then put your lens on and put it
on your body and then check and see how parfocal it is.
And if it's getting better, then keep going in that direction.
If it's getting worse, then go back the way you came from.
And, the way that I like to do this is,
like we talked about earlier, you can zoom all the way in,
get a really accurate focus, maybe zoom in on your monitor,
make sure everything is precise,
and then zoom out and see how sharp it is.
And then, when you zoom out,
you can figure out by then adjusting focus
if you need to adjust focus forward or backward
and then make that adjustment on there.
You're just going to have to keep doing it.
You might have to probably mount and unmount it,
like five or ten times in order to
get it perfectly if that's what you want to go for.
And then once you do, like I said, you can have it
where you can focus on the wide-end even and then
pull into the telephoto end and it'll still remain in focus.
Now, I'll show you how to do it on the Viltrox adapter,
which is pretty much exactly the same except
for one less step, which is that you don't really, actually
need a screwdriver here, but the easiest way I found
to do the Viltrox one was to actually adjust it
from this one because it sticks out more,
so you can just adjust it from the inside.
OK, so I've got the clips loaded up here
in Resolve and I'm just going to look through
the first ones to see if there's any image quality differences
and then we'll check the autofocus a little bit more
zoomed in to see what we can observe about that.
Right, so we zoom in on this first one here
which is the regular Micro 4/3 Metabones and we just
take a look at the sharpness in the centre of the frame
and then let's switch over to the one that's
optimized for the Pocket 4K. Looks pretty much identical
and now we'll switch over to the Viltrox.
OK, there is a slight reduction in sharpness there
in the centre with the Viltrox, as you can see.
Let's jump over to the side here so we can see if
there's anything weird going on. This is the Viltrox one here.
This is the optimized Metabones
and this is the regular Metabones.
I would say the results are the same.
The two Metabones are pretty much identical
and the Viltrox is maybe just, just a hair less sharp,
but pretty insignificant overall.
But this is where you can also see
the difference in the field of view.
So, if you look at the Viltrox here,
and then we look at the Metabones, you can see that
it actually crops in a bit, and same with
the other Metabones. They're pretty much identical.
But then, if you go to the Viltrox, you get
a little bit wider field of view and this seems to be
congruent with that iris thing we were talking
about earlier where it was actually f/1.2.
So, maybe the reduction on the Viltrox
isn't quite as it's written. It may not be 0.71x,
it might actually be, like, a 0.695 or 0.703 type reduction,
and so we're getting just a slightly wider frame
and just a slightly larger aperture,
enough to trick the camera into thinking
that it's a 1.2 instead of a 1.3,
but these differences are pretty insignificant
and they don't really seem to make much of an impact
on exposure because, as I flipped back and forth here,
I can't really see a difference at all.
It seems like the Viltrox is maybe 5% less
sharp than the other ones, but I really don't think this is
going to be an issue considering how sharp all the lenses are
and the resolution that you're getting out of
these cameras, I wouldn't really sweat it.
So now, let's jump over to the autofocus tests.
♪
I was surprised. The Metabones actually
performed quite well here. When I was doing
a quick little preview of it before I saw
the finished result, I didn't think that it was
gonna do this well because it did seem like
it was hunting a lot, but it actually seems quite good.
Now, keep in mind, like I said, this is the previous
edition of the firmware. When I updated the firmware
of the Metabones, it got worse.
And so now, let's take a look at the Viltrox.
And the Viltrox did seem like it was struggling and it's doing
that sort of quick throwing the glass in and out thing.
Now, when it gets it, it gets it fine,
but it does create these kind of less than--
you see that weird, like, pulsing? You don't really want
that extreme slamming of the glass.
It's not going to be pleasant at all in any
kind of video focus transition, but yeah,
it's not terrible, like, for some sort of
shoddy vlog, I think it would work fine.
But if you want a perfect transition,
you cannot rely on using these adaptors. Alright,
so in conclusion, let's talk a little bit about value.
I was pleasantly surprised with this new Mark II of the Viltrox.
I saw some of the videos on the first, original edition
of the Viltrox and it seemed like a more, there seemed
like there was more of an argument there to recommend
spending, you know, four times more on the Metabones,
because the Viltrox just wasn't quite there.
There was definitely a noticeable reduction
in sharpness and there was other performance issues.
But I would say, with the Mark II,
the gap has closed significantly
and it's closed enough to really start to question
if the price premium on the Metabones is worth it,
because yeah, it's like, 4.3 times more,
uh, US, this was like a $150, this one's $650,
and both the Metabones are the same price
whether you get the Micro 4/3 one or the optimized one.
And I've also noticed that with
the lenses that I tested on,
again, the 100mm macro for Canon and the Sigma 18-35mm,
I didn't really notice a huge difference between
the new optimized Pocket 4k one and the original one.
So, my advice is that if you're trying to buy
a Metabones, and you don't own one
and you plan on only using it on the Pocket 4K,
then sure, get the one that's optimized for it.
If you have multiple Micro 4/3 cameras and you want to
swap it around, I don't really think you're going
to lose anything by getting the old Micro 4/3 one.
And if you already own the regular Micro 4/3
one for your Pocket 4K, I would not say
that the new optimized one is worth
selling this one and buying that one or getting the other one.
I think you're gonna get pretty similar results
and I would just stick with your regular Micro 4/3 one.
But if you don't own any and you're considering
the Viltrox or maybe you need a second one,
you're wondering if the Viltrox is good enough,
I would say that the Mark II,
this new one from Viltrox is pretty capable,
and I would say that it's definitely a great value
if we're going to consider the Metabones
the, sort of, price point, and this one's
coming in at a steal, at like I said,
probably only about 5 or 10% worse,
for 4.3x cheaper, so that is a great value proposition.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found
this video entertaining or at least helpful.
And if you did, make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already.
But if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
then go [bleep] yourself, San Diego.
Alright... I'm done!
♪