Sony Extension Ring

To prevent the close contact, the postman left a percel from China outside of my door while shouting Your Post = I got an Extension Ring delivered today.

To have an even closer shot, the Extension Ring is a pretty handy device. You may find such ring for Sony (10 mm and 16 mm set) as cheap as £15 on eBay. And depend on the lens used, you may get quite a close-up photo (the shorter the focal length the closer you get —– though, depend on the lens, the closed image might be pretty bad unless you stopped down the F-aperture a lot.

With such a cheap price, I bought 3 or 4 set of Sony Extension Ring. Since, I discovered, not all of them are good. Some loose bayonet make the joint wobbly (only 0.1 mm wider gap of bayonet makes it loose) —– even worse, some of them stack solid (only 0.1 mm longer bayonet claw can block them disengage) = To separate the camera body — Ring — Lens, I needed to hack-saw the ring and with sheer force, I ripped off the Lens ! (Photo above right two = used be the DG-NEX Extension 16 mm ring = the left over after a hack-saw job.) The trouble is, you discover the trouble only when you HAVE engaged the Lens – Ring – Body. = Then you realised that you got the trouble of stacked bayonet. —– Because of the internal mechanism of the bayonet, we can’t see which part was blocking the ring to rotate back.

This IS what made in China meant. On the eBay, you may see many “Sony Extension Ring” with different prices —– Give close looks = The ring came from only few original manufacturer, then, different vender selling it in a different price. = Expensive doesn’t mean good quality. Manufacturer seemed to sold off bad lot for give-away price then, corrupt vender sold them in the net, expecting most of the customer never bothered to complain for £15. —– So, on the end I bought plastic one = Easier to hack-saw and when I needed, easy to brake-off before the lens or the camera body brake. (Sound dreadful isn’t it)

Those potos were taken by the Sony E 3.5 / 30 mm Macro lens with Extension Ring on A7R-4 body (see a photo above, before) Right hand side image was a cloped enlarged part of the original photo left.

So, when you are lucky to have good working Ring you may get quite nice close-up photo —– especially with such A7R-4 / 62MP image sensor, we can clop the image for even higher magnification scale. (Otherwise, such as x5 ~ x10 magnification needs to have quite a hard work — and a specialised expencive Macro Lens.)

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