The good, the bad, and the frustrating

OK So I posted the other day that I bought a cheap-ass lens and filter kit. I purposely bought at the low end of the scale for two reasons:

1. I wanted to get a feel for how lenses and filters work on this camera. I won't judge completely by this set because it's not the best, but at least I'll get a feel for whether it's worth it to possibly increase my investment.

2. I'm poor.

So for less than $70 I got an adaptor, a wide-angle lens with a macro attachment, a small telephoto lens, and 3 filters: UV, Polarizer, and Florescent. I've been experimenting these lenses for the past couple of days, with decidedly mixed results. (I haven't tried the filters yet.)

First of all, due to the fact that my camera requires an adaptor ring in order to accept lenses, you have to zoom out a little in order to get the actual lens past the adaptor, otherwise you end up with a black ring around your pics. (You're actually getting the adaptor in the shot when that happens.) So there's that.

The telephoto lens is actually pretty good. It provides moderate extension of the zoom on my camera, which is cool for some of the nature and landscape pictures I take. It's the wide-angle lens I'm having a couple of issues with.

When I use the wide angle without zooming in I get this weird out of focus vignette all around the edges of the pic:

But when I zoom in enough to use the macro feature, the wide angle does seem to offer some extra detail:

And I'm starting to come to the conclusion that I may be more ready for SLR than I thought.