In early 2007 I brought a Loreo 3D Lens in a Cap which is a great idea which has been implemented well but very cheaply. It’s a replacement lens for an SLR camera which uses mirrors and (plastic) lenses to take two side by side photos in 3D. It does this by taking two portrait photos side by side on a landscape photo.

Loreo 3D Lens in a cap. Look OK, but looks can be deceiving.

It’s main problems are the quality of the lenses and the aperture.  The lenses are plastic AND the lens only has two aperture stops.

I had to use a side point in my cameras auto exposure as the very center of the frame is black.

The lens has one big bonus: Since the two lenses flip the images (as lenses do), the result you get on your camera is already in cross eyed format.

Exhibit A: Untouched result from Lens in a cap (Links to full 10MP photo)

As you can see from the above photo, about 8-10% of the center is lost due to some ghosting effect. Click on the image and get the full size (6MB) and take a look at the quality of the lens. There is little sharpness in the photo. Note that this was taken in the french alps in more than adequate sunlight.

Here is a photo taken within minutes using a standard consumer grade Canon 18-55mm lens.

Exhibit B. (Links to 4.5 Megabytes of 10 Megapixel goodness)

This is one of the many reasons why I decided to build a twin camera rig… It also looks kinda cool and lets me take high resolution 3D Landscape photos.

As usual, all images are (c) John Burns

In early 2007 I brought a Loreo 3D Lens in a Cap which is a great idea which has been implemented well but very cheaply. It's a replacement lens for an SLR camera which uses mirrors and (plastic) lenses to take two side by side photos in 3D. It does this by ...