Converter Lens

What is the difference between a wide/macro converter and a wide/macro lens?

I was looking to expand (rather start) my lens chest with a zoom lens, Canon had one for about 225EU(Turkey). I'm still considering that one, but wide/macro lenses were much more expensive ('bout 600EU in the cheapest). Then I came across this thing they call the wide/macro converter, priced at about 60EUs, I decided to give it a shot. My question is this, what's the disadvantage of a converter when compared to a real wide/macro lens? The guys at DP review warned against them of having bad optics quality and stuff, but I'm an amateur, I can still be impressed if my 18-55mm EF kit lens can actually shoot a flower as close as 1cm, or get a .45x wide angle view. What do you think? Speak out your professionalism!

if you just want experiment with macro then the cheap converter is OK but if you are serious then you should go for the wide macro lens. the converter will give good results but you might loose the automatic functions of the camera because converters will not be able to use things like auto focus and TTL metering

 

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