Every once and a while I like to stop and give credit where credit is due. Recently manufacturers have started to finally embrace the wide angle part of the lens as a selling point, and I for one applaud them.

Unless you’re shooting wildlife or sports, a very wide lens is usually much more useful to the videographer than a long zoom. Nonetheless it seems for years manufacturers have been using the zoom length (10x, 20x, 30x) as one of the main selling points for their camcorders. I think it all stems from the uninformed consumer who having a choice of a 10x zoom or a 300x digital zoom will obviously think the 300x is better, regardless of the fact that at that extreme digital zoom, it would be hard to distinguish from the mosaic filter.

That being said two recent camcorder releases, the Panasonic HMC150, and the Sony FX-1000 (Z5-U) have equipped their cameras with pretty astoundingly wide lenses.

I’m not sure what recent technological advances have occurred to make these lenses more affordable, but I certainly appreciate it. The 13x wide lens of the Panasonic 28mm-368mm (35mm equiv) is impressive in its versatility. Not to be outdone, Sony’s new camcorders offer a 29mm lens on a 20x zoom as well.

I just thought I’d pop up to give some well deserved praise to the engineers of these new lenses.