Nikon Fisheye Converter FC-E9

Nikon has two fisheye converters: FC-E8 and FC-E9. However, only the FC-E9 can be used on a FZ-10 without problem. The FC-E8 has a 28mm thread and a step-down ring to 28mm is very difficult to be found. The Nikon FC-E9 fisheye converter comes with the lens and front and rear caps. See the left image below. The FC-E9 has a 46mm thread. Therefore, a step-down ring is required. The right image shows a FC-E9 on a PD62 adapter with a 62-49mm and a 49-46mm step-down rings. If your adapter has a 55mm thread, a 55-46mm step-down ring would be enough.

Here are some important notes:

• After mounting this converter, the camera becomes front heavy (see the right image above). As a result, handle it carefully with two hands if necessary, and do not pick up the camera by the lens alone.
• Since this lens is heavy, make sure you will hold the camera (and lens) firmly or use a tripod to minimize camera shake.
• The FC-E9 has a very large front element and can easily invite flare and ghost. Hence, avoid to include a strong light source in or near your view.
• Again, since the front glass element of the FC-E9 is large, one can easily scratch the surface. Therefore, replace the front cap when the lens is not in use.
• Since no flash can cover an angle of view of 180 degree, the use of flash (internal or external) is not recommended.
• Since the FC-E9 has an angle of view of 180 degree, watch out for those "unwanted" subjects such as tripod legs, your shoes, etc in the image.

Focal Length Coverage

This lens has a power of 0.2X. When it is mounted on a FZ-10, it covers 7mm to 84mm (35mm equivalent). However, not all focal range can be used. When the camera lens is zoomed in, the image circle becomes larger. Unfortunately, when the lens is zoomed in to make a full frame fisheye (i.e., the image covering the whole image frame) shot, the camera will fail to focus. As a result, this FC-E9 and FZ-10 combo is best to be used as circular image fisheye.

Close-Up

While you might not want to use this fisheye converter for close-up work because of its distortion, placing this fisheye converter very close to your subject would get you some very creative and interesting effect because the foreground is greatly exaggerated. The shortest camera-subject distance is 0 cm! The following shows the image of the Technical Data table taken with the Fisheye lens touching the CRT screen.

Technical Data

The following technical information is taken from Nikon's manual.