I Need Help Finding A Wide Angle/Pano Lens

I am looking for a good lens to take very wide angle landscape shots with....I typed in "panoramic lens" and "wide angle lens" into Amazon.com and got a lot of listings....but they were all under $40! Am I missing something or are they really that cheap? I will be using it on a Canon Rebel EOS XTi 10mp and I'm looking for the perfect camera to capture wide landscape shots in places like Costa Rica and Australia.

Hi Brandon,

I also have the xti and recently purchased Canon's 10-22 ultrawide angle for my upcoming trip to Tanzania and love it! It's not really an ultra on the 1.6 crop of the xti, so should work fine. Ordered it from B&H photo, but Amazon probably has it too. Around $650 if I remember correctly.
Also takes cool indoor pics.-I can finally get all of my animals into 1 shot.

Lisa

I think that what you are finding at amazon is those wide angle adaptors that you screw into the filter treads of a lens that you already have. Unless your not wanting quality images, I would not go with one of these (they really kill image quality). I don't know how much money you have and are willing to spend, but Canon makes several lenses that I think would work for you. One thing that you also have to consider is your crop factor, which I believe is 1.6x. That means that any lens you use with the Canon XTi will give you a field of view of your lens times 1.6. (example if your lens is a 70-200mm then on the XTi you have a field of view of 112-320mm). This helps on the telephoto side of the lens but really hurts at the wide angle side. I did a search on B&H and found this that might work for you:
Canon 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM. With the crop factor it would be equivalent to a 16-35mm on a full sensor camera. Also this is a EF-S mount, which means it will not work with full sensor cameras, so if you ever upgrade to a full body camera the lens will not work.

For about the same price you can get the Canon 17-40 f/4L USM which is not as wide but will give you better image quality and sharpness. This lens is also compatible with both full frame and cropped frame sensors.

Another alternative is to take several shots and to stitch them in PS or other image program.

Hope this helps.

You might want to consider the Sigma 10-20mm F4-5.6. For around $500 new or $400 used, it is at least as good as the Canon counterpart, slightly better build quality, and very very sharp with moderate to low distortion and better than average CA. The distortion and vignetting is easily fixed in Photoshop, or my favorite plug in, PT Lens. The corner darkening is really minimal, and in most shots not even visible. Obviously you will see some in pictures that have clear blue skies.

You must use a high quality multicoated thin filter, since anything less will cause serious deterioration in image quality.

There is a note of caution, though. Sigma QC continues to be an issue. I advise that you either buy a used one that you can try out, or get a new one and plan on sending it to the Sigma repair facility on Long Island NY to have it "recalibrated." My copy had severe issues with centering, so it was not focused across the field, and there was bad darkening of one side of the image. I had bought mine used, but I arranged with the previous owner to return the one year old lens to Sigma for a warranty repair and 9 days later I received a near perfect lens. See some of my images taken with this lens on a Nikon D200.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/9961692@N04/2049165499/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9961692@N04/1879973372/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9961692@N04/1800363572/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9961692@N04/1716932143/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9961692@N04/1404741508/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/9961692@N04/1281864040/

PT Lens correction software uses the algorithms conceived by the creator of PanoTools, a great panoramic stitching software program, which you should also look into. Typically software developers implement the technology into an application that has a good user interface and value added features, for not too much money.

One distinction to keep clear in your mind: If you are planning to stitch together multiple images for producing a pano, wide angle lenses are not the best choice due to distortion. On the other hand, if you're simply looking for a wide angle lens there are a bunch of options out there.

I'm no longer acquainted with the Canon line of lenses, but can give high praise for the Sigma 10-20mm based on our use of the lens with Nikon mounts. We're using Nikon D2X bodies which have a cropped sensor like your Rebel, and the lens has turned out ot be one of our best buys. I also own the Nikon 12-24mm lens for comparison, and in spite of costing about half as much, the Sigma lens is at least as good in many respects and better in others.

If you are not going to stitch images together, an ultrawide lens is a good solution. If you are going to stitch, then you will be better off with a longer focal length lens. On a cropped sensor, 28-50mm should give you a decent series of images without the vertical perspective effect common with shorter lenses when tlited away from horizontal. Another effect with most ultrawide lenses is the wide angle effect that elongates and distorts elements that are not in the center of the frame. Some lenses correct this better than others - the Zesss 38mm Biogon used on a Hasselblad , the Zeiss Distagons for Contax and Leica are outstanding examples of well-designed wide and ultrawide lenses with little wide angle effect and phenomenal image quality, with prices to match.

If you plan to stitch the images into a pano, you might consider either the Canon 24mm TSE or the 45mm TSE. The problem I have with extreme wa lenses for is that they tend to waste the vertical part of the horizontal image. With a slightly longer lens used vertically and stitching several images together, I think you get a better pano image (certainly a bigger file which you can use to print a wide panorama).