Nike 0.66x Wide Angle Converter WC-E24

General Information

The Nike 0.66x Wide Angle Converter WC-E24 package comes with the lens and front and rear caps. See the image below.

Here are some important notes:

• After mounting this converter, the camera becomes heavy (see the image below). As a result, handle it carefully with two hands if necessary; otherwise, it is easy to break the camera's middle joint.
  Nike 0.66x Wide Angle Converter Mounted on Coolpix 4500

• Since this bulky lens blocks the viewfinder partially, use the LCD monitor for composition.
• Since the area covered by the flash sensor (and the internal flash) is blocked partially by this lens, both the internal flash and external flashes may not work properly.

The on-camera zoom lens is equivalent to a 38mm - 152mm zoom (35mm equivalent). Since this converter has a magnification of 0.66, mounting the converter on the camera effectively changes the zoom to 25mm - 100mm (35mm equivalent). Since adding a converter on top of a lens always reduces some optical quality, normally only the combined focal length that is not available with the on-camera lens (i.e., 25mm-38mm) will be used. In this range we have most of the popular wide angle focal lengths: 25mm, 28mm and 35mm. The relative positions on the zoom scale are shown in the table below:

Shooting in Wide Mode or Regular Mode

You can use the Wide Adaptor mode. See General Operations for the way of selecting a converter mode. Once this mode is selected, the on-camera lens is zoomed all the way out so that the combined focal length is 25mm (35mm equivalent) and both internal and external flashes are disabled. However, you do not have to enter a converter mode to use a lens converter. This means you still can use this wide angle converter in the Regular mode.

Close-Up

The minimum camera-subject distance is about 9cm/3.51 in. If the distance is shorter than this, the camera fails to focus. Should this happen, you can use the Close-Up mode. However, the front end of the lens barrel almost touches the subject (i.e., near zero working distance)! The following shows an example when WC-E24 is used for close-up. The left image below was taken with the on-camera lens at the shortest camera-subject distance (i.e., about 2cm), the middle one used WC-E24, and the right one used WC-E63. As you can see, the magnification of the on-camera lens is higher than that of WC-E24, which, in turn, is higher than that of WC-E63.

On-camera lens, macro	WC-E24, macro	WC-E63, macro
Click on the image to see a larger one

Filter Issues

This converter has a very shallow filter thread of 48mm. Perhaps Nikon does not have any intention of using filters with this converter. Since there is no filter of 48mm, step-up rings are required. Because this lens has a angle of view of 88 degree, step-up rings that can fit this lens should be wide enough to present vignetting, especially that when a polarizer is mounted. This is because polarizers are usually thicker (i.e., two glass surfaces) than most single glass filters (e.g., UV and skylight). We can use a 48-58mm step-up ring for a UV, skylight or other single glass filter. However, a polarizer of 72mm or even 77mm is needed to avoid serious vignetting. The following illustrates the use of a 48-58mm step-up ring and a 58-72mm step-up ring together to bring the thread size from 48mm to 72mm. Then, we can mount a 72mm polarizer. A slim wide-angle polarizer is even better.

The WC-E24 with two step-up rings and a polarizer mounted

Make sure that the step-up rings are mounted firmly. Otherwise, they may fall out while you rotate the front element of the polarizer. It has been reported that some step-up rings do not stay on the converter's thread firmly due to the problem of a shallow thread.

Note that you really do not need this setup to use a polarizer. You can visualize the effect by turning the front ring of a polarizer until the desired effect appears. Then, attach the polarizer directly in front of the lens converter barrel with your hand. This works fine if you have a free hand to fix the polarizer in position.

Focus Distance

If you use Manual Focus or use Infinity focus mode (i.e., the mountain icon), the focus distance is different from the actual distance. Consequently, you should ignore this distance and use the LCD monitor to make sure your subjects are in focus.

Examples

Here are a number of sample images. Most of them were taken using the widest focal length (i.e., 24mm), and hence the typical wide angle effect (i.e., converging lines) is quite obvious.

Click on the image to see a larger one

Technical Data

The following technical information are taken from Nikon's manual. These information are for 950/990/995/4500 only, and should be different for other Nikon cameras.