The choice of macro converters available recently increased when Panasonic started to ship its 37mm filter thread macro converter, which can be mounted on a Panasonic 14-42mm Vario X pancake lens.

I had bought a macro converter from Siocore for the 37mm filter thread, earlier, and I would like to know how it compares to the one Panasonic is now selling (for more than twice the price).

To allow a comparison, I shot an object with many small details that many people should have access to - a 50 Euro bank note.

The focal length has been set to 42mm (the longest possible with this lens), and I tried to adjust the camera to object distance as narrow as posible, such that the autofocus was displaying a happy green frame. (I guess this distance adjustment method is not much more precise than +- 3mm, but that should be enough.

The center of the shot is aimed at the "roof top" inside the "5" of the "50", I think that is easy to replicate if you want to take another sample shot.

Light source was thermonuclear (the Sun :-), the aperture 10.

The attached image is the full frame as extracted from the raw .RW2 file (the only postprocessing applied while converting the RAW to JPEG was white balancing - no sharpening, no noise reduction or such).

I would be very interested to see results from other macro converters, especially regarding minimal focus distance / minimal object size.