TEST: Cheap is not the same as Value for Money

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I have a confession - I love eBay.  I use the world's favourite auction website to buy and sell photographic gear and I have never (yet) been caught out or paid too much for something. However sometimes an item is too good to be true and this week I have a prime example of this.
Grantham Cemetery a great place to test the newly purchased wide angle conversion lens

I have fallen in love with my newly purchased Fuji X100 pro spec compact camera and the images it produces are so sharp from the 23mm f2 Fujinon lens that they rival the shots I get from my full frame Nikon D700 DSLR and pro lenses. 
However I do love wide angle images, my favourite combination with the Nikon is my 17-35mm f2.8 wide angle zoom.  So when I found out that Fuji have produced a Wide Angle Conversion Lens (WCL-X100) that makes the 35mm f2 (equivalent) lens a 28mm f2 lens without any loss in quality I thought that was the answer to my dreams. 
At £249 it isn't cheap, quality never is, so I decided to look on eBay to see if any were coming up second hand at a good price.  The answer was 'no' but there were 'X100 compatable lenses' for not a lot of money coming from Hong Kong. Hmmm!  Anyway I bid on one and duly won an auction at the grand total price, including P&P, of £15.24.
The lens arrived this week and on first sight the lens was good, quite heavy with a black metal construction.  So far so good.  It attached to the 49mm filter thread on the camera and off we went to take some test shots in Grantham Cemetary across the road where I live.  Well, the results were of the standard you would expect from a lens that cost £15 from Hong Kong.  The centre of the images were OK, ish, but the edges of the frame were badly distorted.
The following shot was taken on the X100 with the conversion lens fitted -
Image taken with Wide Angle Converter fitted

And this shots was taken from the same spot with the standard 23mm lens -
Standard shot with 23mm f2 Fujinon lens without the WCL fitted

A world of difference, I'm sure you will agree. 

However this isn't a surprise at the price I paid but at the same time it isn't something that is good value because the results aren't acceptable.  For me the standard WCL-X100 is the item I need as I can't use the cheap converter for any of my work, the results are just too poor.  However it has shown me what I can get with a WCL-X100 and that will be the next item on my shopping list for the superb Fujifilm X100 Black.

The moral of the story is you get what you pay for - especially for pro spec photographic equipment!

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