Just a quick question – other than artistic merit, whats advantage of a 10mm fisheye lens vs a 10mm wideangle?

Cheers!

None I can think of unless you are a fish

I think a wide angle is more versatile, a fish eye is very specific piece of kit, with limited function

None.

You can always distort a normal picture to gain a fisheye effect for when you want a crap photo 😉

but likewise, you can distort a fisheye photo to wide angle when thats what you want.

fisheye is actually the ‘natural’ lens, wide angle is distorted. Your eyes see in ‘fisheye’ but your brain makes it all look normal

Fisheye always makes me think of sunny days watching SoCal skate vids

Er, doesn’t a fisheye with the same focal length have a much wider field of view (and can be defished)?

Eg http://www.16-9.net/lens_tests/fovs.html

Interesting example. The de-fished has ended up with something like a 16:9 aspect ratio so de-fishing doesn’t come ‘free’.

I’ve got both a 10-20mm “normal” wideangle zoom and also a 10-17mm fisheye one. Both are great lenses but I’d have said the normal wideangle gets at least 10x as much use as the fisheye does.

De-fishing can work however there are some issues (based on my limited experience):
– To make the resulting shot look normal you really need to keep the horizon level and across the middle of the frame
– Any optical issues become more apparent (e.g. CA) because some of the pixels seem to get stretched as part of the de-dishing process