Speed Boosters are originally intended to adapt full-frame lenses to APS-C or smaller sensors. Still photographers who are already using full-frame digital cameras may find no use cases for them.

For videography, however, many full-frame mirrorless cameras have cropped video modes. This first happened in 2015 when filmmakers used Speed Booster ULTRA on Sony A7R Mark II (ILCE-7RM2) because the Super-35 crop mode of that camera offered superior 4K video over the full-frame pixel-binned video mode. As new full-frame cameras continue to attain higher resolutions, it becomes increasingly difficult to read all the extra pixels out of the sensor quickly enough at video frame rates. Pixel-binning lowers the image quality of the video compared to 1:1 readout or oversampling, but if on the other hand, the camera oversamples a full sensor readout, the processing power required may generate excessive heat that may limit recording time. The third option is to have a center crop, which can be mitigated by a Speed Booster, thereby getting the best of both worlds – high still photo resolution, high video quality and good thermal management. extraordinary optical performance with improved corner sharpness, less distortion and reduced vignetting.

The plenitude of imitators attests to the significance of this new invention, but even after 10 years the genuine Speed Booster remains unsurpassed in optical quality. The difference is the most pronounced when a lens with a large maximum aperture (e.g. f/1.2 or f/1.4) is used.

Read the White Paper here.