Almost since video cameras appeared, budget indie filmmakers have been trying to find a way to make them work as a film substitute, to create film-looking footage affordably. Initially the results weren’t all that satisfying. As Steven Dempsey (“Disjecta” on DVXUser) puts it:

“For years, I found ways of extracting the “video look” from the footage I shot, preferring the look and feel of 24p instead of the classic 60i. There is just something magical about it that I cannot describe adequately. It’s not quite real but it is still believable. When I watch 60i footage, I am not at all transported to a different world, I am hyper aware of the reality it is recording. I finally found the cadence I was looking for when I bought my beloved DVX100a.

Being the perfectionist I am, I would watch my favorite movies and be all too aware of what was missing in my own shots. Cameras in the class of the DVX have very limited control of depth of field. There are all kinds of tricks you can employ to simulate narrow focus, like zooming in to blur out the background, using ND filters to force the iris open, etc., but I still wasn’t getting what I wanted. Zooming in tends to flatten the subject and it certainly distorts the subject’s relationship to his or her surroundings in terms of perspective.

I was astounded when I first saw footage shot with the mini35. I couldn’t believe the footage originated from a video camera. This unit was indeed a miracle and I had to have one. My enthusiasm fell flat when I found out the min35 cost three times the price of the DVX. The technology behind this adapter is fairly simple and I wondered why it had such a huge price tag.”

I know what he means. Once, a few years ago, I used a P+S Technik mini35 on my DVX100 and fell in love. It’s a magnificent piece of equipment, and it should be, at its price: approximately $11,000. It gave the footage the shallow 35mm-style depth of field that we’ve come to expect from a movie camera; in many ways it made the footage look much more like it’d been originated on 35mm. If someone would give me one for free I’d be thrilled to have it, but no way would I spend that kind of cash on an accessory for a $3,500 camcorder.

Obviously others were put off by the price tag too: a cottage industry sprang up, starting with the Agus35 homemade adapter, trying to emulate the mini35’s capabilities but using homebuilt products designed around found-it-in-a-garage-caliber parts like a scratched-up clear CD for a “ground glass”, and a motor from a CD player. It was a fun and interesting process to watch as people experimented with wax, and Nikon focusing screens, and static ground glass and vibrating models and all sorts of developments.

Some inventors have launched commercial versions of their own adapters, usually at price points around $1200. That’s 1/10 the cost of a mini35. And as far as image quality goes, the best of them do indeed rival or, as Steven says, can actually surpass the image quality from the mini35. With so many options to choose from, which one should you put your money down on?

I can’t answer that for you, but I can tell you which one I gambled on, which is the same one Steven did. “I kept hearing about something called a “Letus” and people were talking about it because it was the cheapest of the bunch. Users began to post footage of what the Letus could do and, while not completely impressed, I saw a lot of potential. Eventually, I took the plunge but, to be honest, I chose the Letus based on my budget restraints and not a whole lot of quality research.”

I was also attracted to the Letus because it was really inexpensive (comparatively), but also because I saw something in it that none of the other low-cost adapters offered: it renders the image upright, rather than upside down. On DVXUser and other forums there’s a lot of talk about people trying to cope with the “flip” from low-cost adapters, and there are several issues that come up:

1) monitoring the footage is more difficult, usually involving some method of mounting a monitor upside down (potentially damaging a CRT or professional monitor) or buying a separate LCD to use for framing (which adds additional cost), or

2) Some cameras allow you to use a magnet to “flip” the camcorder’s LCD panel, making monitoring on the built-in LCD possible (provided, of course, that your camera supports the “magnet” trick, and the magnet doesn’t fall off, and you don’t try to close the LCD panel while the magnet’s in place or else you might break your camera’s LCD hinge, and on and on…), or

3) You could use DV Rack 2.0 HD to monitor the footage, which works fine for DV and DVCPRO-HD but which introduces a half-second of lag on HDV cameras, plus it means having to be tethered to a computer; and finally

4) Regardless of your monitoring solution, your footage is still recorded upside down. Which means you’ll have to rotate every frame you shoot in your nonlinear editor. And if you’re planning on just shooting and then handing the tapes over to a client, you’d better make sure they understand that everything they get will be upside down!

With the mini35 none of this is an issue. The mini35 displays and records the footage right-side-up. Why can’t any of the low-cost adapters do the same thing?

One can. The Letus35 Flip Enhanced. It delivers clear sharp imagery, with the added bonus that it flips the image automatically to be right-side-up, so you view and monitor properly, and it records properly. No hassles, no workarounds, no problems at all. It Just Works. And, it’s about half the price of many of the others. And the purchase price includes free shipping! In short, I was sold; I placed my order on November 29th, 2006.

Now, here’s the funny part: my adapter showed up on December 2nd, 2006. That’s three days for it to go from order to delivery, and I’m on the opposite coast! It showed up via Priority Mail in just three days; compare that with reports of some of the other adapters having delivery times of six to 12 weeks!

I opened the box and pulled out the Letus 35 Flip Enhanced (hereafter “L35FE”). And that’s all I pulled out of the box, because there were no instructions, not a single sheet of paper to describe how the unit works or what to do with it. Fortunately I had a bit of experience with some of these units and knew what to do; I’ll describe the setup process here a little later on. But thumbs down for packaging; it was just an adapter in a box of Styrofoam peanuts. You’d expect it to at least be wrapped in a plastic bag or something (anything!) Fortunately, packaging is probably the easiest thing to fix, so hopefully they’ll upgrade their packaging procedures. “Like Barry, I was expecting the packaging to be a little more professional and I searched through the packing peanuts for the instructions but I found nothing. Fortunately, I had a working knowledge of the basics of the unit so it didn’t take me long to figure out what to do. Once I got over that initial learning curve, I was able to mount it and be shooting in under a minute.”

To Flip Or Not To Flip?

Quyen Le, designer & manufacturer of the Letus adapters, offers units with and without the flip element. The flip element adds a lot of bulk to the unit; a simple vibrating Letus adapter would be much smaller and less expensive. Both adapters use a two-AA battery pack to drive the vibrating motor; the Letus35 Flip Enhanced adds the ability to project the image right-side-up and also includes the dual-mount lens mount. In terms of aesthetics I think it looks a little cheap; there’s an external battery pack attached by Velcro to the outside of the adapter and two thin wires (one red, one black) trail to the inside of the unit. It’d be a cleaner/sleeker package if he hid the wires inside the unit, and perhaps molded the battery case directly onto the flipping element’s housing – then the overall unit would look much more polished and presentable. But, hey, at the price the flip for you, so I’m not gonna complain about a couple of wires!

Another nice touch is that the L35FE includes a reversible lens mount for both Canon and Nikon lenses. I used the Canon side, and used some old Zeiss Jena M42 (aka “Pentax screwmount”) lenses with an M42->Canon adapter. The Canon and Nikon mount on the L35FE don’t offer positive locking, so you have to tighten the lens to the mount and pay attention to make sure the lens is securely mounted; if you aren’t paying attention it’s potentially possible that you could end up rotating it right off the lens mount. I never encountered anything remotely like that, I’m just mentioning it as a caution: be sure to mount your lens snugly on the mount and you should be fine.

The L35FE came with a 72mm lens thread mount; I used an 82mm->72mm adapter ring to attach it to my HVX, and a 43mm->52mm step-up ring, combined with a 52mm->72mm step-up ring, to attach it to my HV20. The same adapter works for both.

As far as setup goes, I had the Letus operational in about five minutes (I’ve heard stories of other adapters requiring two and a half hours to get them configured; I can’t fathom why or what they’re doing in that amount of time!) With the L35FE you thread it onto your camera’s lens threads, attach the battery pack, and mount a Nikon or Canon lens. Then you’re ready to set the field of view and start shooting.

Technical Setup

Having read many posts by various users about the struggles they have with many different adapters when trying to achieve good edge-to-edge sharpness and minimizing vignetting, I’m becoming convinced that lots of people (users and even some of the manufacturers) may not necessarily know what the proper configuration should be for one of these adapters. The goal should be to mimic the depth of field and field-of-view of a 35mm movie camera – that’s what the mini35 does, and that’s what you want to do to have a constant frame of reference and predictable results. A 35mm movie camera has a frame size of about 22mm x 16mm, not the 36mm x 24mm size of a still camera. What you want to do is zoom in to the ground glass far enough that you set up your field of view to match what a 35mm movie camera would see, using the same focal length lens at the same distance. An easy way to do that (and get pretty darn close) would be to use an 8.5 x 11” sheet of paper, taped to a wall sideways (i.e., “landscape” orientation), and set your camera about two feet away from it. With a 50mm lens, focused at 2’, you should be just cropping off the edges of the paper (ideally you’d have about a 10.5” wide field of view from two feet away when using a 50mm lens). If you configure your zoom such that you’re just cropping off the edges of the paper, you’re basically matching the field of view of a 35mm movie camera at that point.

You can zoom out some and still get imagery (and actually shallower DOF), but you’ll start running into two problems: light falloff at the edges, and soft focus along the edges. When zoomed out wide I found that the edges were quite dark and extremely soft, but when properly calibrated for the HVX I found the Letus35FE’s light distribution to be nice and even, with just a very small dropoff at the edges, and decent (but nowhere near perfect) edge-to-edge sharpness. The edges do get softer, but not distractingly so.

For the HVX, I could get a full-frame image when zoomed out as far as 27.4mm, but there are two problems – first, that image size is way too large, and is probably more representative of a 35mm still-camera frame size, not a 35mm movie camera frame size. And second, when zoomed out that far, there’s significant light falloff on the edges (making for a “vignetting” effect; darker corners with a hotspot in the center.) I instead recommend zooming in to Z44.0mm, with a focus distance (at least on mine) of 7.22 feet. At those settings the image frame matches what a 35mm movie camera frame would be, it matches the field of view of a 35mm movie camera, and the light falloff is brought much more under control. It’s still not uniformly bright from edge to edge, but it’s quite close; I used a waveform monitor to measure the brightness across the field and found that the IRE dropoff at the edges is really minimal, and certainly close enough to “good enough” that I’m not concerned about it at all. Z44.0/7.22ft seem to be the right & proper settings for using this Letus35 Flip with this HVX, but that focus distance depends on how tightly the adapter is screwed in, too – minor differences in distance can have a huge effect on your focus distance. I found it rather easy to get precise focus on the ground glass by taking the still-camera lens off of the adapter and pointing the ground glass at a light source, and then letting autofocus work to get precise focus on the surface of the ground glass. Once autofocus locked in, I switched back to manual focus and left it there (have the Letus motor switched off when using autofocus to focus on the ground glass surface.) Be aware that the focusing on the ground glass is crucial to getting good results; once you’ve set perfect focus you may want to actually tape down your focus ring to keep it from moving on you unintentionally.

Light Loss

One problem with lens adapters is that they all lose light; you need more light when working with any 35mm lens adapter. So how about how many stops of light are lost with the L35FE? Using my f/1.8 50mm lens I measured the difference between with-adapter and without-adapter; the difference was about 1+5/6 stops. On the Letus35 order page (http://www.adapterplace.com), Quyen Le states that the L35FE adapter (with a 1.4 lens) loses 1.5 stops of light; I don’t have a 1.4 on-hand to test with but I’d bet he’s right.

How much does 1.5 stops mean? It means you need three times as much light to deliver comparable brightness. It’s simple enough to test in your own circumstances; set up a shot, take your light reading, and then stop down by 1.5 stops and see if you can live with that. What extra light do you have to bring in to get the shot back to its original brightness? That’s the kind of extra work you’d need to do when using an adapter like the Letus35 Flip Enhanced.

You’ll have to get used to light loss with any adapter, and with the Letus35 FE, 1.5 stops is a lot. But, consider that it does the flip for you, and with the mini35 the loss is even more significant. For the cost and the self-flipping, I think the light loss is perfectly reasonable – but you’ll want to invest in some fast lenses if you’re shooting indoors! Especially if you’re using it on a small-chip high-def camera; all the 1/3” (and ¼”) HD camcorders need about four times as much light as their standard-def counterparts already, and adding another couple of stops of light loss really becomes noticeable.

Steven says “Light loss is a big issue with the adapter. Luckily for me, I tend to shoot outdoors so natural light is usually adequate. It would be hard to shoot anything indoors without compensating for it with more powerful lights than you would typically find in a room. This is not necessarily a huge problem. Look at how fast users have come to adapt to the P2 workflow. It is more like a film environment where magazines are changed frequently. If you look at the Letus the same way, you should light interiors like you would for a film. What makes a shot beautiful to me anyway is the creative use of light and mostly, for interiors in most films, there is supplemental light used. A small lighting kit does not cost a lot. In fact, china balls are only a few dollars and can give you dramatically beautiful results and provide more than adequate light for the Letus.”

The Vibrating Motor

As far as the motor goes, it’s nearly silent. There’s just the tiniest amount of detectable vibration; I could feel it in the tripod handle, but I couldn’t hear it at all unless I stuck my ear directly on the Letus. The L35FE is, to my recollection, quite a bit quieter than the mini35. Any unit that uses a moving ground glass is susceptible to operator error in that you may forget to turn on the motor (I know I ruined a few mini35 shots when forgetting to turn the motor on!) With the L35FE that’s not really going to be an issue – the grain pattern is very, very visible when the motor’s not active! Still, it’d be nice if there was a little red light on the unit to let you know that it was running, because you’ll very likely forget to turn it off when your shot is done; keep some spare AA batteries with you in any case.

First Impressions

“My first experience shooting with the Letus was amazing,” says Steven. “I went off the deep end shooting stuff up close with a depth of field that could be measured in millimeters! I wanted to see just a fraction of the frame in focus and the rest blurred….yeah, yeah! Soon I realized that, in order to truly get a “film look”, I had to control the depth of field and decide what was important to focus on in my frame. If you watch any feature film, you will notice that shallow depth shots are nicely balanced with other shots that have much more in focus. Depth of field needs to be used as a tool for directing the viewer’s eye, rather than arbitrarily focusing and defocusing on various subjects in the frame. All that aside, the speed in which I was able to use the Letus on the camera was very encouraging to me. The Letus is compact and can easily fit in my backpack along with my camera. No rails to worry about. This is also an added incentive for me to actually use it. Too big and cumbersome to me means I’m not going to use it most of the time.”

The L35FE attaches via screwing into the lens threads. Some adapters need to be mounted on rails; that certainly makes for a more rugged/secure mount, but it also makes the combined camera/adapter unit larger and more cumbersome. Steven certainly prefers the lighter/smaller package: “If smaller lenses are used with the Letus (I use Nikons: 28mm, 50mm and 100mm), then there is no need to use a rails system…another huge plus for me. My style of shooting tends to be grip and rip a lot of the time and I like to go handheld if I am shooting a lot of fast-paced action like a sports event. The Letus is light, weighing in at just over a pound and, without a need for rails or any other appendage, it makes hand held not only possible but practical. I also confess that if I had to set up rails and if it took more than a minute to set the adapter up, it would probably be sitting on my desk gathering dust.”

For a studio configuration, rails certainly look more impressive and if the worst were to happen (i.e., if you dropped the camera) I’d imagine that the L35FE wouldn’t fare too well, whereas a rails system might survive that better. But of course there’s no reason you couldn’t use rails with the Letus if you wanted to; the question really becomes one of economics and bulk. You can certainly use rails with the L35FE if you want or need to; if using a large 200mm or 300mm lens I’d definitely recommend using rails.

Lab Testing

I did have to spend a couple of minutes adjusting the backfocus; with the Canon mount I found that having it fully seated didn’t allow for proper infinity focus with my lenses. I had to pull the mount away from the Letus body by about three millimeters before my lenses would properly register infinity focus. That’s not good; I would expect better quality control than that, and have made the manufacturer aware. Quyen is very, very quick to respond to customer service inquiries and will properly backfocus your unit for you if you have a problem. (However, I will admit that I was using a mount adapter for Canon->M42 so perhaps that complicated matters and messed up the infinity focus. I don’t think so, but I will allow the benefit of the doubt here.)

I tested the adapter on the HVX in two stages: lab/chart testing, and then out in the “real world”. Under chart testing, I was surprised. This thing is sharp. Very sharp. Surprisingly sharp. I mean, the mini35 (using the same lenses) introduced noticeable softening in the image, even on standard-def, but with the L35FE the shots look almost as sharp as without an adapter at all! And that’s amazing. There’s definitely some edge softening, but for the overall main shot of the subject it’s surprisingly sharp – especially when considering how grainy and gritty and “visible” the ground glass is when the motor’s not running; I really expected it to soften the image noticeably, but it doesn’t. There is a small bit of softening and some grit introduced, but it’s mild and much less than the mini35. In chart testing I was very, very impressed with the L35FE.

Click image for full size version

You do have to compensate for some loss of contrast and loss of color saturation; I set up a specific “Letus” scene file in the HVX to match the “raw lens” look. Basically I turned up the detail +2, turned up the coring +2, raised chroma level to +3, dropped chroma phase to –3, and dropped the master pedestal to –7 (from my normal of –4). With those settings, and proper white balancing, I was able to get the Letus and non-adapter (aka “raw lens”) footage to match very well. Some of this compensation was for the adapter, and some for the still-camera lenses I was using; lenses can introduce a bit of coloration into your images so you may have to compensate for individual lenses especially if you’re using multiple brands.

Interestingly, Steven found the color saturation issue very different with his Canon XHA1 using the L35FE: “Contrary to Barry’s findings on the HVX200, I have found, while using my Canon XHA1, that color seems to be more vivid using the Letus and I usually compensate by turning the chroma level down on the camera. I do agree that some contrast is lost but I usually compensate for that in post production by doing a levels adjustment. I, like Barry, have also developed a preset that is unique for the Letus. Also, on my XHA1, I have the ability to set a specific focus point and zoom range which I can recall at any time. Once I have nailed both for the adapter, I simply enable them when I put the adapter on and it saves me even more time. I frequently check that nothing has shifted between takes.”

Focusing

Anyone who’s used a small-form-factor HD camcorder can probably attest that focusing in the field is already a challenge. Getting critical focus accurate on a small HD camcorder is much more difficult than it was with a standard-def camcorder; adding a 35mm lens adapter makes the job much more difficult! You’ve really got to pay attention to what you’re doing, and closely monitor your focus. Remember that with a 35mm adapter, the whole point of it is to narrow your depth of field, which means that there’s a much shorter range of distance where objects are actually in focus. That makes the task of keeping focus more demanding on the camera operator.

“Critical focusing in HD when using any adapter is difficult but not impossible using the LCD of your camera,” says Dempsey. “It’s easier to focus correctly when you have a very shallow depth of field but once you close down the iris, what looks sharp in your LCD might be ever so slightly off once you watch it on an HD monitor. This is not such a big deal when using SD cameras such as the DVX because SD is much more forgiving regarding focus but in HD it is a big deal. When focus is off just a tad in HD, the frame can look more like uprezzed SD-originated footage.” I should add, you have to use the magnified focus assist – if you’re trying to focus without that, using just an on-camera LCD, I doubt you’ll get many shots in focus at all.

An external HD monitor can help greatly. Dempsey says “For critical shoots with the Letus, I use a 7” Marshall HD monitor which takes a lot of the guesswork out of what I am doing but also tethers me to my tripod. Goodbye handheld shooting. There are trade offs for every situation and you need to decide what’s good for you. For those of you that have seen the baseball footage I recently shot, all of that was handheld and focused by just eyeballing the LCD alone.”

Patrick and the A1 w/Letus35FE:
Baseball.wmv
Baseball1.wmv

Field Testing

Lab testing can only tell you so much - you won't be doing much shooting in the lab, after all! So I took it out to the harbor, and shot trees and skies and boats and pelicans and all sorts of things. And for the most part it performed absolutely admirably.

And then I took the footage back to my HDTV to review it. The footage was gorgeous, the shallow depth of field really added an extra dimension of depth to the shots, and provided that "missing link" that finallylets 24p video footage look very much like film-originated footage. Over all, I am very, very happy with how the Letus35 Flip Enhanced performs.

Any Drawbacks?

While Steven and I are both quite happy with our Letus35 Flip Enhanced adapters, they’re not perfect. Steven’s observations include:

1. The unit is not sealed. This is good and bad. It’s good because you have access to nearly everything inside the unit and it allows you to easily clean dust without having to use surgical instruments J This is bad because the unit is susceptible to all kinds of dust and dirt and there are very few places in the world that do not have particles floating around in the air. Dust can easily get into the adapter and can be hard to see until you sit down at your computer after the shoot. These specks are more visible during shooting if you are using a decent external monitor but this is a luxury most users won’t be able to afford. I have suggested to Quyen that he seal the unit in the future to avoid this problem. I know this is one thing that has been a high frustration point for past Letus users. Example frame here:
   
   

   Click image for full resolution version.

   
   
2. The lack of a locking mechanism for the lens attachment in the front of the Letus can make me a little nervous about damaging the lens if it were to fall off. You just need to be really aware of fitting the lens tightly.
   
   
3. The Letus is secured by way of a large metal ring that screws onto the front threads of your camera and then the rest of the adapter slides snuggly onto this ring and you can revolve it so that the imaging plane is oriented perfectly. There is no locking screw to keep it aligned and it sometimes can slide out of alignment. I have urged Quyen to put a thumbscrew here to avoid this problem .

In addition to Steven’s comments, perhaps the thing that I found that caused me a bit of concern was the “Freezing The Grain Pattern” issue. What I found was that in bright white/overcast skies, or on bright white objects, we can sometimes notice what looks like a slight smudgy fixed-pattern noise laid over the image. As you pan across those bright objects it can sort of look like a blotchy smudgy “layer of dirt” on the image, like as if you were looking through a slightly dirty window. At first I thought I must have done something wrong, so I set out to shoot more subjects to see what happened.

I shot seagulls flying, and I used the 60p and 36p overcranking modes of the HVX, and the “dirt” got even worse. In overcranking mode it was completely unacceptable.

It appears to me that what’s happening is that with a faster shutter speed, the system is able to “freeze” the ground glass pattern, although only visible on brighter images. The whole purpose of the ground glass vibrating is to make it invisible to the camera, but higher shutter speeds appear to cancel that out and make the pattern visible. And this pattern is much more noticeable when using overcranking, because then the higher shutter speeds and slower frame rate can actually cause the ground glass to be more visible, and you can see the pattern moving on your shot in slow-mo. Definitely not what you want.

So – what to do? How big of a problem is this? To be sure, I went back to the $11,000 mini35, since it is also a vibrating-type adapter, and – yep, it does the exact same thing. The mini35 can’t be used for those high-shutter-speed or slow-mo type of shots either. It’s just not going to be part of your repertoire. So if an $11,000 adapter can’t solve the issue, I don’t know that I mind that a $700 adapter has the same issue. I suspect no moving-ground-glass adapter will prove immune to the effect; if the ground glass is moving, there’s going to be a shutter-speed/frame rate combination that makes it visible, and this is something that the user is going to have to monitor closely and be acutely aware of.

(a purely static adapter like the MovieTube should be able to avoid this issue entirely; just be aware that the MovieTube is $17,000!)

So, what can be done? Slowing the shutter speed helps hide the smudgy grain enormously; using a slow shutter speed really helps clean up the image. When you’re using slow-mo you normally don’t want a slow shutter speed, but if you want to combine a moving ground-glass adapter with slow-mo, you’re going to have to make a compromise somewhere; using a fast shutter speed really accentuates the grain issue. And overcranking/slow-mo makes it all the more noticeable because you can really see the vibration pattern. I would think that perhaps the ground glass needs to vibrate at a much faster pace in order to make the pattern less visible perhaps? It may be that some of the other adapters (that use a rotating ground glass rather than a vibrating one) may have an edge here for this particular application; I believe that the rotating design may allow for the ground glass to move much faster, thus making it able to withstand higher shutter speeds before the ground glass pattern becomes visible.

In Summary

In a mixed-lighting environment the L35FE can deliver stunning results. With bright skies and whites, you’ll want to use the slowest shutter speed you can justify, and keep a good eye on your monitor – but this applies to all moving-ground-glass adapters, not just the L35FE. There are engineering tradeoffs that could get around this; using a finer ground glass would improve low-light performance and minimize the fixed-pattern noise, at the expense of having more light falloff and darker corners.

Steven says “Each adapter in this class has its own unique look. Although these differences may be subtle, I really like the footage the Letus produces. There is something magical about it and, when I capture my footage after a day’s shooting, I am nearly always pleasantly surprised at the way it renders the world around me. The adapter is sharp and the softness at the edge of the frame is not distracting at all, even in HD.”

Gallery

Stephen's Grabs:

Demonstrating depth of field control: Click images for full size version(s).

Demonstrating sharpness using three different lenses: Click images for full size version(s).

Barry's Grabs:

Stock HVX: Click image for full version.

80mm: Click image for full version.

135mm: Click image for full version.

Customer service has been excellent as well; I’ve found Quyen to be very responsive. Steven says “I have no regrets about my purchase and look forward to working with Quyen in the future. He has an incentive program where he will give you an excellent trade-in price when a new version becomes available. This is a great investment because, as this adapter becomes incrementally better, you can upgrade at a mere pittance and the results will just keep getting better and better. Quyen is committed to this product just as, in my experience; he is committed to listening to his customers and going above and beyond the call of duty to satisfy his their needs.”

Bottom Line

No adapter is going to prove to be perfect; but for the price I think the Letus35 Flip Enhanced is an amazing deal and well worth the money, especially if you don’t want to deal with the hassles of monitoring or flipping an upside-down image. The fact that it renders the images right-side up makes working with the adapter so much easier, in production as well as in post. It looks great, it delivers sharp results, and it’s easy on the wallet. There are many adapters out there, each with their own redeeming qualities and each deserving of your consideration. We’re just reporting here that in our experience the Letus35 Flip Enhanced does what it does very well, at a great price point.