EdMika 0.5mm FD-EOS adapter for 200mm 300mm 400mm 500mm 600mm 800mm Canon EF

Note: I will be away from Wednesday November 21 to Sunday November 25.  Any sales from this period will ship out on Monday November 26th. I will make a few extra adapter kits of each lens type that my wife will mail until they run out.

The long awaited replacement to the EdMika 0.75mm EF-FD glassless brass adapter is finally here!  I personally am proud to announce the heavily re-engineered 0.5mm FD-EOS (nFD, FD, FL)-(EF,EF-S) dual-orientation glassless brass adapter.  This is exactly what you need to take your white FD super telephoto lens and coupled with an easy and reversible focusing element position calibration achieve original lens performance on your Canon DSLR camera.  It will also bring the greatest focus distance from any other FD lens by minimizing the lens to sensor distance, effectively placing it at 44.5mm.  In fact, I could make the claim that the adapter places the lens at 44.3mm since I found a way to squeeze an extra 0.2mm out of the original FD mount design by tightening tolerances and reducing a critical undercut dimension.

Why dual orientation / bi-rotational?  The extreme closeness this adapter gives you puts all aperture trigger levers into a contact position with areas of full frame and 1.3 crop bodies (but not 1.6 crop bodies such as the 7D/60D/rebel.    The old 0.75mm adapter also created a contact condition and people using full frame/1.3crop bodies were grinding down the aperture levers or living with getting marks on the plastic area near the electrical pin contacts.  By allowing the adapter to be mounted 90 degrees counter-clockwise from normal position, the aperture lever can be moved into an area where this contact condition does not happen.  So why did I make the adapter also work in the normal orientation as well?  All the white super telephoto FD lenses (The FD 200mm 2.0L, FD 300mm 2.8L, FD 400mm 2.8L, FD 500mm 4.5L, FD 600mm 4.5 and FD 800mm 5.6L) have a rectangular area near the back to make room for the complex larger aperture lever mechanism that causes vignetting (darkened corners) on full frame sensors. This darkened corner condition can be fixed easily in Lightroom/Aperture/Photoshop but some people may still not want to be bothered with post process fixes.  For these people we added a secondary notch at the end of the aperture holder mechanism in the normal orientation so that they can bend the lens aperture lever inward enough to prevent the contact condition.  I am not a fan of permanent modification, and bending a lever is more reversible when compared to grinding it down.  Those lucky 1D series 1.3 crop owners need not worry and just enjoy the rotated adapter position without any darkening issues in the corners because of the slight crop and the 1.6 crop body shooters can do whatever they want since either orientation works perfect and does no damage.  The only compromise in this dual FD side orientation adapter solution is that for the older silver twist ring mounts you will have to use your thumbnail or FD lens cap to trigger the twist release mechanism since this new hybrid EdMika FD-mount no longer triggers the release itself.

The adapter can also be used with shorter focal lengths but focusable distances drop below arguably useful levels under 200mm focal lengths except for macro lens shooting. For people wanting to make use of some of the wonderful vintage Canon glass of shorter focal lengths I highly recommend the Sony NEX-5N/7 with a 1.5 crop factor (vs. micro 4/3rds 2x crop) until a full frame mirror-less body comes out.  The NEX also does quite well with the longest super telephoto lenses apart from looking like a glorified lens cap on them but the 1D4, 7D put it to shame image quality and resolution wise in most shooting conditions.  If you however are lucky enough to have a copy of the fantastic FL 55 1:1.2 lens, I have also developed a lens specific conversion kit for it.

We now make these adapters 100% ourselves using a very high precision vertical cnc mill, lathe and cut-off-bandsaw at my father-in-law's garage in a small town an hour north of Toronto Canada.  This gives us the time we need to tweak our development process instead of the few hours we were given before by machine shops we had used in the past. This awesome FD-EOS 0.5mm dual-position adapter solution is really is pushing the limits in just about any way you care to imagine because of this flexibility we have.  

As always my brass adapters are machined from a single solid puck of 360 grade brass. Why solid, uncoated Brass?  Because Brass is softer than your camera flange and your vintage FD/FL lens promising not to damage your precious gear in any way but still strong enough to hold on through even heavy abuse.   Because with Brass we can maintain higher tolerances by not having to add the thickness variability of a coating process and because glue holding reporting chips holds well to bare metal but bonds poorly to coatings.  Brass is really beautiful to work with and worth the material expense.

My adapters continue to come standard with a Gen4 programmable Dandelion chip to give accurate EXIF data reporting, proper metering and some AF confirmation assistance although in practice the eye (especially using a proper focusing screen) or live view is the most accurate method.  Please note that know issues with these chips is an occasional loss of signal which can affect proper metering for a moment that can cause a lightness spike in a video.  To overcome you can shoot video in manual or tape over the chip contacts.  If you wish to buy any of my adapters without a chip to use them bare or to glue on your own favourite chip brand, just make the note "no chip" on your paypal purchase and I will refund you 20 dollars and send the adapter without a chip.

For details on how to calibrate the focusing element on the white super-telephoto FD lenses search edmika on youtube for the instructional video.  For up to date development info I now have a twitter feed @EdMikaAdapters and often post picture updates on flickr as user ontarian.  I also have an article detailing the history of this specific adapter's development on the website canonrumors.  I'd include direct links to these places but the folks at ebay who are more than happy to take lots of my money for selling here no longer allow them.  For those of you unsure about taking apart a lens for the calibration, I am working with the highly skilled and experienced lens conversion specialist Jim Buchanan in California who can be contacted directly (just goggle search him) and he will have my adapters in stock.  He also offers many lens refurbishment, tuning and cleaning services on top of conversions.  I have found an example of a FD 300mm 2.8 L lens that did not quite reach infinity focus using the focusing element calibration I describe in the youtube video.  I personally inspected this lens and found there was significant thread tolerance differences between it and my own copy.  For this lens that did not reach infinity the fix was to use a small circular file (or dremel tool) to elongate the calibration slots by less than 1 millimetre.  After this the moving focusing carriage part may come into contact with the top part of the lens when screwed together but it is metal to metal contact, not metal to glass so this will not do any long term damage.

I ship by Canada Post letter mail with tracking ever since we figured out how to package the adapters small enough to fit under the thickness requirements that was impossible with our previous bubble wrap packaging.  As an extra bonus, each EdMika brass adapter now also comes with a Canon labelled rear EF / EF-S lens cap to protect your lens should you choose to keep your adapter always mounted to the FD lens.

A sample of focusing distances using the EdMika 0.5mm FD-EOS (nFD, FD, FL)-(EF,EF-S) dual-orientation glassless brass adapter

FD 85mm 1.2, 5 feet / 1.5 meters (I recommend the FDn mount swap kit for this lens instead to get infinity)

FD 200mm 2.8, 25 feet / 7.5 meters ( I recommend the FDn mount swap kit for this lens instead to get infinity)

FD 200mm 1.8, unknown ( infinity with lens calibration though I do not have a copy of this lens yet)

FD 300mm 2.8L, 95 feet / 29 meters ( infinity with lens calibration)

FD 300mm 4L, unknown (infinity with lens calibration but there is an extra pretty hard step to do it)

FD 400mm 2.8L, 164 feet / 50 meters (infinity with lens calibration)

FD 400mm 4.5, 277 feet / 85 meters (infinity with lens calibration)

FD 500mm 4.5L, unknown (infinity with lens calibration)

FD 500mm 8 mirror, infinity (with easy removal of a stop screw under rubber focus grip)

FD 600mm 4.5, infinity (Removal of stop screw in nFD version gear housing helps maintain infinity in low temp shooting – reportedly not needed in SSC versions)

FD 800mm 5.6L, infinity (Removal of stop screw in nFD version gear housing helps maintain infinity in low temp shooting – reportedly not needed in SSC versions)

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