On a whim, when I purchased my Canon 28mm-135mm lens I also ordered a Phoenix 2x Teleconverter as well. I’ve had a chance to play with it and so I thought I’d share my thoughts. However I must warn you, it’s not very pretty.
In a nutshell, if I could have my $79.99 back, I’d take it in two shakes of a lambs tail. It had a decent review after I did a bit of digging on the internet, therefore I went with it and bought it. I didn’t really need it, I bought it mainly just to see if it would be usefull. I will admit it does a decent job of extending my 70-300mm out to about 400mm, after that it’s pretty uselesss. One of the big downfalls, and this may be with all teleconverters, is that it doesnt auto-focus when racked out. It’s not a super big deal because I am able to manually focus pretty fast, but the intent of the teleconverter is to double your length, and for wildlife or sports photographers the ability to not quickly auto-focus can be a detriment.
One of the problems with teleconverters, as far as I can tell by reviews, is that many of them destroy your image quality when racked out with a higher focal length lens. I experience this problem with my 70-300mm, which the teleconverter made into a 600mm. The frame was practically un-focusable and the resulting image looks like my newborn nephew took a photo with his fisher-price digital toddler camera.
I can’t say many good things about this. But I’ll let the test photo’s speak for themselves:
As you can see, far from anything decent. These were both shot with a 70-300mm with the phoenix 2x attached. Focused out to a total of 600mm.
So on to the pro’s and cons.
Pro’s:
• $79.99 paperweight
• $79.99 new toy for the puppy
• Decent for doubling the minimal focal length of a lens (turning a 70mm into a 140mm) withouth zooming.
Con’s:
• Terrible resolution when racked out
• Disables autofocus capability of lens (may be teleconverter specific)
• Practically unfocusable when racked out to full focal length (when handheld)
• $79.99 paperweight (yes its a pro, but who needs a $79.99 paperweight?
So the moral of the story, don’t buy with your gut. This is what happens when you buy things on a whim. I should know better. It’s one of the things that will drive my future wife up a wall.
-Nb
I agree with this review. Completely. It certainly doubles the image size, but so what!?! If it’s blurry, you sure haven’t gained anything.
I took one photo with no zoom (Nikon D90 kit 18-105 lens) but with the 2x Phoenix converter. Then removed the converter and zoomed so the picture would be the same size as the first. The first (w/ converter) was significantly over-exposed and out of focus. The second was fine. I used autofocus on both. So then I tried “cheating” the focus with the converter by manually “missing” on each side of “sharp”. None of them turned out (although it looked like you might be able to miss a little short and get it somewhat better than autofocus would do.
But why bother? Does anyone want to buy a Phoenix 2x teleconverter? Hardly used! I could give you a good price.