Lens attachment for a point-and-shoot? What the heck?

[Shpyder]

I just ordered a Canon SD850 IS. I've read excellent reviews on it, and my cousin's Canon 550 took the best quality pics I've seen from any compact point-and-shoot to date.

However, I came across this on eBay:

http://cgi.ebay.com/2X-Tele-Photo-Ma...QQcmdZViewItem


So, my question is, does the lens in the link really work with these point-and-shoots? Or is it just another "miracle" accessory?

[drunken monkey]

yes and no.

these things equate to the old telephoto - adapters (2x 4x etc) that you could get for SLRs and they do what they say they can do.
However, on an SLR that has a decent quality lens in it focussing on 35mm film, there is still vignetting around the edges and in some cases, dark edges and maybe some distortion in the centre as well.
On an SLR where you can manually adjust everything properly and have a light meter to read off, this is less of a problem because you can crop out the bad areas when you enlarge (assuming you've been using low speed film and printing on good paper)

With a digital camera that focusses through a not so good lens onto an even smaller ccd that only approximates the image, the errors that you'd get on a film SLR are magnified.

In short, yes it will give you the 2x telephoto but it isn't fault free.

[Shpyder]

Thanks for the info. Considering the cheap price, I suppose it just might be worth a try for use on large landscape type pictures, and then photoshop might help with the cleaning up the pic. I figured it would be a tradeoff between quality and more image area, like you said.

[Damien]

^Cheap? If you say so. I never bother with attachments to a P&S. That's what an SLR is for.

[96lumina4.3]

Don't bother with it. The resulting image quality won't justify the magnification.

[96lumina4.3]

btw: The 850 is kick@$$! But then again I'm biased