Sunpak - Platinum Plus 37mm 2.0x Tele Conversion Lens - Black

There was a huge thick piece of hair, like whisker hair, inside the lens mechanism. No way to get it out. I have a Sony camcorder CDR-HC96 and have been on a mission to capture closeups of relatively rare Orioles. After squeezing as much as I could from the camcorder, I still wanted closer so got this lens, which is NOT a Sony lens. I can't even FIND a sony telephoto for this camera, though will keep looking. There were several adaptor rings, but the one mounted on the lens was hard to get off. I used a rubber band to get a grip on it. The ring and the lens then screwed nicely to the camera, and was easy to get on and off after that. I could live with the hassle of changing lenses. When you use an extension like this, when zoomed out, there will be a round tunnel effect, so don't be surprised. Learn its capabilities and shoot around it. I can live with that...just won't pull all the way out, or trim in editing. When fully zoomed in, the lens tends to flare, glowing color aberration on the brightly lit areas...very obvious. Zoomed fully out, I not only got the tunnel effect, but with the sun hitting the lens, every micro particle of dust was totally in focus. a Scum of dirt, which disappears optically when you zoom in. A general shoot of landscapes was satisfactory, and the auto focus was pretty quick and accurate through the lens, from closeup of hummingbird to distance, to nearby bush and grasses. If there IS another telephoto for my camera, I'll get it. I have to return this becasue of the hair, but will probably keep it until I can find something really good.

I tried this tele converter on 2 different Sony camcorders (40x optical and 20x optical zooms) and both exhibited poor results. The auto focus is rendered useless when zooming out to 10x and manual focus is required. Even during manual focus getting a sharp image is virtually impossible. In both daylight and night time conditions the result was bad but night time was particularly troublesome. Focusing on the moon or a street light for example resulted in the image looking very much like a lens gel or soft effect filter was being used and hazy to the point of making the video useless.