Fantasea BigEye Lens M67 Mark II Customer Review

I recently purchased and am very pleased with a Fantasea line BigEye Lens M67 MarkII wide angle lens for my Olympus EPL3 camera with the Olympus housing. I use a  Sea and Sea YS110a strobe for flash fill. Currently my wife and I are on our sailboat “Emerald Seas” sailing and diving off the coast of Belize. Although I have been diving and taking pictures underwater for many many years this is my first use of a BigEye lens. I would like to thank Tal Mor and his crew at MOZAIK Underwater Cameras for all their help with this and other purchases.

I have had great success with this BigEye lens. It is a “wet” lens which means it must be screwed onto the 67mm port thread after the start of the dive. Make sure all bubbles are removed from the camera port and the wet lens before screwing it on. I found it a little difficult sometimes to get the threads started. After a bit of practise I discovered pointing the camera to the surface then screwing on the lens made the job easier. Also, as stated in the instructions a little silicone grease applied to the threads before the dive helped. When I am not using the BigEye lens I store it on my strobe arm using a 67mm Grabber. This keeps my lens relatively safe altho there is no lanyard attached to the lens. Be careful not to drop your when doing shark shots in thousands of feet of water.

The lens gives a much wider field of view and of course makes a huge depth of field where everything is in focus. I did not notice any vignetting or distortion around the edges of the pictures. I can now get in nice and close so my strobe lights the foreground subject and still gives a nice view of the rest of the ocean in the back ground. This is a very pleasing effect.

This lens only gives 100% angle of recovery so it is far from the 180 degree angle for a fish eye lens. There is very little curving of image edges. However, it is handy for shooting larger fish which you can get closer to so you can light them up better with your strobe. I have included an image of a large Nassau Grouper. I could not get close enough with my standard 14mm lens to saturate the scene with the strobe but with the BigEye I could sneak in and really light him up

Yes I would recommend both MOZAIK Underwater Cameras and Fantasea Line equipment a big thumbs up.

Cheers,
Jim Mendria