Saturday night was my first opportunity to use the adapter at an Indian music concert. I don't have any primes longer than 100mm, so this was perfect. I could use my Canon 70-200 f/2.8 zoom and have it become an f/2 lens! At ISO 1600 I could actually get a reasonable exposure when stopping down on the lens!
A brief summary of my experience is that yes, the electronic aperture works. In fact, it works very well. I was thinking that I would have to constantly remember that the aperture was one stop wider than the lens is set to. In practice, the lens adapter had already taken this into account and was reporting back the correct aperture to the camera! I could take my lens and dial is all the way down to f/2. The iris wheel on the side of the FS-700 worked flawlessly. I could also turn on image stabilization, which was essential when operating at 200mm most of the night.
Below are some basic pictures of the Metabones adapter. You can see the electronic control pins on the inside of the lens flange. The lens release is on the right of the stand-alone picture. They have a USB port on the other side of the adapter (side not shown) for firmware upgrades. No firmware updates were done here. In fact, I didn't have time if you read the last post about the Micron riser plate.
Another basic picture of the FS-700 and the lens adapter, this time with a Zeiss ZF.2 lens attached.
The only difficulty I had with the adapter all weekend is that my Zeiss 21mm ZF.2 lens (Novoflex adapter to go to EF mount) wouldn't focus at infinity. I later took this same lens and mounted it to my 5D mark II and it would focus at infinity, even with the Novoflex adapter. I don't want to start any unconfirmed rumors, but perhaps the Metabones adapter has the same (too good) tolerance issue that the Blackmagic camera is currently suffering from. If you open the picture below and look at the palm trees in the background, you'll see that they aren't in focus. Being a half mile away, these should be in focus when the lens is set to infinity. I realize that this was the FS-700 AVCHD codec,but it shouldn't be that blurry. I also noticed the lack of sharp focus when punched in on the viewfinder so we can't blame the codec here.
Overall, I think The Metabones Speed Booster is a great product and worth the money for Canon L-series lens owners. It's a great way to transition over from DSLR video to a higher quality video camera. I realize this is a more difficult ask, but I wish Metabones offered a version of this same adapter that would electronically control the Zeiss ZF.2 aperture pin. That would be brilliant.
The adapter is available for rent in the shop. Call Salvador if you have questions about it.
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