Well, it's not every day a package arrives from Minsk, but here it is.
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I've always wanted a fisheye lens, so January 2005 I took the plunge and ordered a Peleng off EBay for my Canon 300d.
Now, I am in England, the EBay seller is in Canada and the lens is in Belarus, once part of the Soviet Union. I paid my money with PayPal and sat back to wait... and exactly two weeks later it arrived!
Well, it's not every day a package arrives from Minsk, but here it is.
One major concern was Customs Duty and VAT (sales tax). Here in the UK we pay an astonishing 17.5% VAT, and import duty on camera lenses brings the total up to about 22%. Also, depending on the method of delivery you may have to pay an admin fee to the delivery company or the post office.
Luckily the customs declaration on the package was completely undecipherable, so I guess the
customs man didn't bother poking his nose into this one and went off to catch some drug
smugglers instead.
Excitingly tied with string, the brown paper is removed to reveal...
A kind of plastic sandwich box, securely taped up. This is actually a good idea as the Royal Mail sometimes like to leave your packages out in the rain for a time, or dip them in a river.
Cut off the tape, and we find...
A Russian manual (?), an English manual, and a "Leather Look" case with a spare (slightly longer) strap.
This was a nice surprise... didn't realise it came with all these goodies.
The English manual is a little gem, with instructions such as "Remove the front cover from the lens before photographing." and cleaning instructions: "A wadded tampon slightly moistened with special means for optics should remove pollutions"
Let's have a look inside...
Inside the case we find:
1: Three funny little filters
2: Two funny adaptors
3: Something large and heavy bubble wrapped and taped.
The adaptors are for the old Pentax M42 screw thread and a Nikon bayonet adaptor. These attach to the lens with three small screws. The adaptors and caps are all metal.
I don't think I'll be using the little filters for anything.
A bit more hacking with the scissors, and there she is.
It came with a Canon EOS mount already fitted - you can buy the lens without this mount for a slightly cheaper price. Some EBay sellers only include the EOS mount as an expensive extra, so check before buying.
The top ring is used to set aperture, from 3.5 to 16.
The big "UNLOCK - LOCK" ring is used to switch from wide open f3.5 to whatever aperture you want to actually use as set by the above ring. You can unlock it to frame the shot, then lock it to take the picture.
At the base there's a focus ring running from "M" to infinity.
In Marco Pauck's review his lens had an uneven coating on the front element. Maybe I got lucky as mine seems evenly coated.
Compared to the 300d Kit lens, this thing is incredibly heavy - it seems carved from a solid block of metal. The only plastic is the rear lens cap.
That front element is huge. The front cap is metal too, and as Marco pointed out, it doesn't sit on too firmly. However, if you were in a war zone you could keep it in your breast pocket and it might well save you from a bullet!
The main compatability problem with the Peleng concerns the rear element, which sticks out quite a long way. This can collide with the mirror on some cameras (Nikon in particular).
On the 300d (and presumably the new 20d) this isn't a problem. EF-S Lenses have an even larger rear element, indeed a standard rear lens cap won't even fit on an EF-S lens.
I took off my kit lens and stuck on the Peleng - which fitted just fine...
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