Adapting B4 Servo Zoom Lenses to the GoPro MISSION 1 PRO ILS

B4 Electronic News Gathering lenses were THE way to shoot the news back in the day. They were designed for standard definition video cameras with tiny 2/3" or 1/2" sensors, and they had smooth battery powered servo zooms that started fairly wide for hand-held video shooting, and zoomed way in for capturing news events too dangerous to get close to. With the advent of larger HD and 4K sensor broadcast cameras, most older B4 lenses ended up in dusty news room lockers, never to be used again. That is until now! GoPro has just released the MISSION 1 PRO ILS, an interchangeable lens video camera with a tiny 1" sensor, and B4 lenses look fantastic on it!

The GoPro MISSION 1 PRO ILS has a manual Micro Four Thirds lens mount, so to adapt a 2/3" B4 lens to it, you'll need our Fotodiox B4 to Micro Four Thirds adapter. Mounting the lens on the adapter is as simple as lining up the locking pin on the lens with the locking pin hole on the adapter and tightening the blue ring. The adapter has a tripod foot, so you can balance the weight of a B4 lens on a tripod rather than on the GoPro's tiny mount.

Most 2/3" B4 lenses have a powered servo zoom, and Fotodiox offers a B4 2/3" 6 or 12 pin to D-tap power cable, so you can power this zoom with a V-lock battery. You can also manually zoom for quicker zoom ins and outs. For this demo, we used a 2/3" J15x9.5B Canon TV Zoom lens. Here are some demo images showing the lens at it's widest and zoomed all the way in, from 9.5mm to 143mm.

One issue you'll run into with Standard Definition B4 ENG lenses is color fringing. This is because these lenses were designed for special 3CCD sensors that used a prism to split light into separate red, green, and blue signals. So when you adapt a lens like this to a camera with a modern digital sensor, you'll see the RGB color fringing. Some people don't like this look and choose not to use these older B4 lenses, while others don't mind the look and embrace it as a stylistic choice. Below are some demo images showing the color fringing we got on the GoPro MISSION 1 PRO ILS.

2/3" B4 Lenses are an affordable, stylistic servo zoom option for GoPro MISSION 1 PRO ILS users. They're not for everyone, but they may just be for you! Check out this link to learn more about our B4 to MFT adapter: https://fotodioxpro.com/products/b4-mft-p