Sorry it’s been so long in the making, been rather busy testing out new bits of kit and earning my bread and butter!
This is a truly marvelous piece of kit, something I have been anxiously awaiting for almost a year! It’s taken Hien and the team a long time to make this as they really have gone to town with it. They have used the same wonderful prime lens that they have used in the B4 pro relay meaning you can go as wide open as f1.5. That’s fantastic news as when you zoom into the ground glass using the stock lens to around Z72 your iris drops down to roughly f2.8. So effectively you are gaining about 2 stops of light by using this relay. Brilliant news for you DPs and shooters who like using as much natural light as possible and for all those indoor shoots. 2 stops is a massive difference.
Those two stops come at a cost though. I don’t know the exact pricing but it won’t be “cheap”, but this is a pro piece of kit, you don’t have to buy it! The Letus line work great by screwing onto the stock lens and zooming in and focusing, but it is more cumbersome and effectively less professional. This is just like the mini 35, but better, faster, sharper. The build quality is very good. It weighs a tonne! You know the glass used here is top notch. The first relays Letus made in the old days were based on rubbiish Minolta prime lenses which were slow and magnified the image too much. The only magnification you get now is because they have set the relay to be optimized for Academy frame size, which is what the PL lens projects. For them to make a lens that would effectively keep the frame size for both SLR lenses and PL lenses the relay would have to be a zoom, that would mean a lot longer and most definitely slower.
In a way we have been spoiled all this time with this larger sensor size. Movie cameras, both 35mm film and Red have sensors the same size as this relay, the Academy size. So unfortunately that is the downside. But the positives more than make up for this. The extra light available, the shortening of length making the camera less like a bazooka, the ability to lock down the back focus and also the ability to still really control that DOF by having dual iris, one on the lens and one on the relay. You never know if demand is there perhaps Letus will make a 35mm SLR sensor version. Anything is possible!
I can’t compliment them enough. For the first time, I feel like i am shooting with a proper camera, not a Frankenstein contraption, which is what all these adaptors effectively are. By losing the stock lens it becomes a “proper” camera. This relay is the same high quality as the B4 relay and absolutely pin sharp edge to edge. It work with all three full size letus adaptors, the Extreme, Elite and Ultimate.
Available soon from CVP/ Mitcorp
Have a look for yourself and see the relay in action by clicking here
[starrater]