Vormax +0.5 95mm Diopter

• Diopter by Vormax

Diopters are awesome because they help you keep squeeze consistent, allow you to get closer to your subject and “hack” your lens’ original minimum focus. This here is a 95mm +0.5 single element diopter. It’s pretty light and it comes with a hard case. The main goal of a +0.5 diopter is to give you middle-range focus. This is the strength you want to use for your medium shots and freeflow close-ups. Your focus range will loosely go from 2m to roughly 1m, or 6ft to about 3ft at minimum focus.

The challenge is low-power diopters, like +0.5 are hard to come by, especially in sizes larger than 72mm. So we’re always looking for options, as lots of us have lens fronts larger than, well, 72mm. For example, a handful of projection lenses need filters larger than that!. Until now, you needed a lot of patience and time to find a +0.5 diopter that covered those fronts and got you that mid-range. And this is where Vormax’s diopter shines.

I didn’t have anything with a 95mm front, so I had to use step rings and made a tough comparison by putting Vormax’s diopter against an Iscorama +0.5 achromat, which is supposed to have much higher quality glass and performance.

The Iscorama achromat keeps the Sirui 50mm super sharp and clean shooting wide open. Vormax's, while holding up well at the fast aperture exhibits a bit of magenta chromatic aberration on Finnegan's whiskers.

Looking at a chart, it seems impossible to tell the difference. To be honest, I had to punch in by 300% and crank up the saturation to reveal that the Vormax diopter is a bit colder than the Iscorama and shows a tiny bit of chromatic aberration. Going all the way to the corners we can also see a little bit of difference in terms of resolving power, with Vormax's being a bit blurrier, but again, we're at 400% zoom here. This type of difference doesn't break an actual shot in the field.