Anamorphic

Anamorphic on a Budget – Rapido Clamps

November 29, 2015

I struggled for a while trying to come up with a solution for mounting baby anamorphics. Thankfully, Rapido Technology showed up and solved my issue. Here’s a quick video about their clamps for anamorphic adapters!

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Tito Ferradans in for what I expect to be a short video about something other than lenses but almost as much as important! Around July I was able to get this little guy – Iscomorphot 8/1.5x fixed focus – for a reasonable price off ebay and it had been stored away in my closet since then for a few reasons. Number one – I didn’t have a clamp for it. Being a baby anamorphic, getting one of Redstan’s clamps was the only way I could think to mount it onto a taking lens. Bad part, they’re sold out since I got my baby Möller, about two years ago. So I just kept the lens in there, waiting for divine inspiration to come up with a cheap and effective solution that I could share in a video with you. Fortunately, I didn’t have to spend too much of my mind on it, since recently (late September!) we started seeing posts from one Jim Chang about his new clamps, named Rapido Technology.

I had never heard of him before, neither of the brand, but it seemed reasonable. After a few short conversations I headed to his website and got a little lost. He pointed me to the correct page where I could find a clamp for my baby Isco and I made the purchase. Right then and there he told me I forgot to add the inner part of the clamp to the order, to which the Isco would fit. At first I was kind of confused, since I thought I had already got two rings, so what could be missing? I added the missing part to the cart and I have to admit, it only made perfect sense once the thing arrived at my apartment – with a very short shipping time, I might add.

This is the Rapido clamp: you have this outer ring, which has the three small screws and a 67mm thread that attaches to your taking lens. Then, inside there’s this golden ring which fits snuggly inside the outer part of the clamp and, screwed into it, there’s a ring threaded specifically to your anamorphic lens. In my case, it’s a tiny hole in the middle, for the Iscomorphot, but Jim collected quite a wide range of anamorphics over time and offers clamps for anything I tried looking for and all the lenses I previously owned. You just have to tighten the screws when alignment is right.

So, here’s how the Rapido clamps can be useful for almost any serious anamorphic shooter out there. You probably have more than one lens, which implies either more than one clamp or switching clamps every time. With the Rapido adapter, you can have just one outer 67mm ring with the screws and simply replace the gold-inner ring, attached to your other anamorphics. The outer ring also has a tiny white mark which you can use to sync alignment without even checking flares once you set it for the first time: just make a tiny mark using a pencil on the gold ring, and voilá! Replacing and aligning the lens is just like the name of the clamps, “Rapido”, which in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese means “fast”.

My only issue with the whole enterprise would be with the website, which is kind of messy and confusing, but having Jim always available on facebook to reply to any questions and actively participating on the anamorphic groups was a great incentive to pull the trigger on this product and I don’t regret it. The other option is still Redstan, but getting replies from him is a bit hard once in a while, plus his price tag is way higher than Rapido’s $39 + inner ring, ranging between $5 and $15 bucks.

That was it for this week. I got a ton of other videos in the making, about all of SLR Magic’s anamorphics and some more, so bear with me! Subscribe to be notified about upcoming videos and head on to the blog for the written review of the clamp and much more. If you have any questions about this product, don’t hesitate and shoot them away, either in the comments below or facebook! See you next week, Tito Ferradans out!



  • Rapido Adapters is reviewed by Tito Ferradans | RAPIDO TECHNOLOGY November 29, 2015 at 10:05 am

    […] Check out the latest review of Rapido Adapter by Tito Ferradans on his blog. […]

  • TFerradans. · Anamorphic on a Budget – Iscomorphot 8/1.5x June 19, 2016 at 8:30 am

    […] with two diopters (which are way too strong at +2 and +4). The rear threads are non-standard, but I already made a video on how to mount these on your taking lenses and align it using Rapido […]