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I Made the "Next-Level" Camera and I love it
- PaulHoule 6mo agoThis lens https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05 https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05 is a fantastic wide aperture lens which is commercially available, affordable and a great value. Personally I tend to get bored if I am walking around with a 50mm lens but with that lens, the challenge of manual focus, the ability to take photos with hardly any light, and the ability to take dreamy photos like people have never seen I have so much fun. They make it for all the major camera brands. Overall I am impressed with Chinese lens manufacturers who make other lenses like https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-9mm-f-5-6-ff-rl/ https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-9mm-f-5-6-ff-rl/ which again are a great value and let me take pictures you haven't seen before. https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/9mm https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/9mm
- fennecfoxy 6mo agoManual focus I keep for film, I feel like it's a part of the process. But I do wish my Sony 50 was a little less noisy/slow. Suppose I should pick up the GM version at some point.
- zimpenfish 6mo agoI've got the 7A 35mm f/1.2 in M43 which is pretty nice for a walkaround lens. I'd probably opt for the 50mm f/1.2 since it's 1/3 the price of the f/1.05 (£90 vs £260 for the M43 mount) if I didn't already have double-digit number of 50s in PK mount that I use with an adapter (and they're surprisingly good for 30-50 year old lenses.) (I've got a 7A 10mm f/3.5 that I've not really got around to using much but now the UK is heading into Fake Summer, there's more light to make it useful.)
- hdndjsbbs 6mo agoWorth pointing out that there's a 2x crop factor on M43, so the 50mm M43 is effectively a 100mm. I agree that 35mm on M43 is a nice walk around length, it's a little longer than a full frame 50mm already.
- niccolove 6mo agoAnd keep in mind crop factor applies to aperture too! A 50mm f1 on M43 in equivalent to 100mm f2.
- wao0uuno 6mo agoIf you're thinking about the depth of field then yes. Exposure wise f1 is f1 no matter the sensor size.
- niccolove 6mo agoI think that actually it applies to exposure too? Because a M43 sensor is going to be "half" the size of Full Frame, which means that the pixels will have 1/4 of the area, so you need 4 times the light to have the same amount of noise per pixel, i.e. two stops of light... but feel free to correct me here, I only have double checked the math on the depth of field part of it.
- wao0uuno 6mo agoYeah kinda. Amount of light per area is the same but smaller sensors have smaller pixels that have worse SNR. This means the sensor receives the same amount of light per area but still needs to boost the signal more because of smaller pixels. I believe that if a full frame camera and MFT camera with the same pixel pitch and lens existed it would get exactly the same SNR and exposure. So basically with smaller sensors DOF is increased, exposure remains the same, SNR gets worse.
- walrus01 6mo agoThere have been significant advances in mainland china made scopes in the last 5-7 years as well. For instance the Arken EP5 5-25x56, 34mm tube first focal plane. Which until recent tariffs and things sold for around $400 to 500 USD shipped. No it's not as good as a $1299 or $2199 Vortex, but it's definitely not the junk-tier stuff that was completely disregarded by everyone who wanted something usable on a budget for >500 yards.
- germinalphrase 6mo agoSky Rover is releasing binoculars that are very comparable to alpha tier Euro brands. I tested their Banner Cloud 6x32; the total build quality package isn’t quite there against my Swarovski 7x42 SLC, but optically the Sky Rover is excellent.
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- pnathan 6mo agoI have found TTArtisans 50mm f0.95 to be quite nice.
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- atombender 6mo agoLaowa (aka Venus Optics) makes a range of excellent macro lenses, too. I use the 65mm f/2.8 2x macro with my Fujifilm cameras, and supposedly it improves on even Fujifilm's famous 80mm macro in sharpness. Another fun, small one is the Korean brand Samyang (also sold as Rokinon, Bower, and some other names). Their 12mm f/2.0 manual wide angle is excellent despite being quite cheap. Photos I take with it often get a unique look that I can't really explain.
- zyrconlabs 6mo ago[dead]
- arc_light 6mo ago[dead]
- thenthenthen 6mo agoI think next-level would be a hypercentric lens that can see around / behind objects as build buy Applied Science: https://youtu.be/iJ4yL6kaV1A?si=QG7YfeXkOqzoK46O https://youtu.be/iJ4yL6kaV1A?si=QG7YfeXkOqzoK46O
- NooneAtAll3 6mo agowhat if I want the opposite effect? I hate blur, how do I remove all of it?
- 4gotunameagain 6mo agopinhole camera and an insane amount of light. Or, multiple exposures and HDR.
- nimbleal 6mo agoNot sure how multiple exposures helps? Smaller sensor, tighter aperture. So yes, more light or a more sensitive sensor.
- SoMomentary 6mo agoThey must mean by creating a composite image with multiple in focus areas? Otherwise I agree, I can't see anyway that multiple exposures would help, at least from some light reading on Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_exposure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_exposure
- 4gotunameagain 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking :)
- dbspin 6mo agoShoot at a higher fstop with a sensor with a high native ISO, like 12,800.
- adzm 6mo agoThe trade off is so much noise
- CarVac 6mo agoFocus stacking.
- IshKebab 6mo ago> Now, here's the kicker: Come on now.
- huflungdung 6mo ago[dead]
- foldr 6mo ago> And, the combination of wide-angle-view and super-high-aperture would literally require light to pass through the metal of the camera in order to reach the sensor: This isn’t necessarily true when using a retrofocus wideangle design (as most modern ultrawide lenses do).
- arijun 6mo agoDoesn’t that remove the narrow depth of focus the author is going for?
- foldr 6mo agoNo. Depth of field is determined by aperture and focal length. Whether or not a lens has a retrofocus design isn’t relevant.
- wao0uuno 6mo agoAnd sensor size. The bigger the sensor the shallower the DOF and better the perceived quality of blur at given f-stop.
- foldr 6mo agoIt’s only the focal length and f-stop that affect depth of field. Sensor size affects it only indirectly, because you need a different focal length to get the same angle of view. From an optical point of view, light does not bend differently just because you put a differently-sized rectangle somewhere in its path. Or to put it another way, if you cut the edges off your sensor, that won’t alter the image on the remaining area of the sensor.
- wao0uuno 6mo agoYeah I guess you're right but there are limits on how shallow your DOF can get on smaller sensors. So when it comes to practical irl results you kinda need a larger sensor to get extremely shallow DOF.
- JKCalhoun 6mo agoCould also combine with the "scanner back" and not have the intermediary screen you have to photograph. Of course everything has to remain quite still… Next level indeed: https://youtu.be/KSvjJGbFCws https://youtu.be/KSvjJGbFCws
- niccolove 6mo agoThis is an option I wanted to experiment with, but when I decided to use it for the short film it died off in my mind. (I even checked how many fps we'd get with a scanner...)
- bambax 6mo ago> multiple scenes that specifically required a very thin depth of field The images at the end of the post are indeed amazing, but I find it funny that we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning. For most of the history of moving pictures, cinema had the exact opposite problem: it looked for the deepest depth-of-field possible in order to make every part of the image count and not waste it to blurriness. It's a weird reversal of expectations.
- Retr0id 6mo ago> we're so obsessed with shallow depth-of-field as a sign of "quality" and/or meaning It's not necessarily a sign of "quality", but it is something we see less often, which makes it more interesting. Phone cameras can't do shallow depth of field, for example. And of course, the human eye also has a limited DoF range. It is interesting to see things in a way that we cannot directly perceive.
- Lerc 6mo agoThe harder to achieve has prestige due to rarity. When the rarity goes away the prestige makes whatever the item was highly popular before the prestige fades. Then the older form becomes more rare and valued by some, in a manner not quite the same as prestige but as a sort of decerning choice. White bread did this, as did purple dye, and synthetic materials.
- miladyincontrol 6mo agoThe advances of modern AF and focus pulling systems truly has led to a world of consequences in amateur and even professional film making. In a world where anyone can take half decent video with the phone they always have, its a sign of "I have dedicated hardware to have taken this". The chase for toneh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ8VodC19-g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ8VodC19-g Not only do many see it as a sign of quality, it lets you ignore the set and stage more than ever. Imperfections? Anomalies? Bah they're blurred out of recognition. Of course it can be used still mindfully and tastefully however such nuance is ever more rare. Most of my cameras both digital and film alike are medium format. While I'm more of a photographer than someone who does much with video it pains me to have to remind people regularly, just because I can get insanely shallow DoF with the creamiest bokeh they've seen doesn't mean it always makes sense to. Theres a story to be told with foregrounds and backgrounds, and how they can be used to guide the viewer.
- tsunamifury 6mo agoThis photographer seems to be chasing the Alec Soth look which can be had with a large format camera and a scanner back. https://www.mcad.edu/events/visiting-artist-lecture-alec-soth https://www.mcad.edu/events/visiting-artist-lecture-alec-sot...
- brucedawson 6mo agoUnfortunate typo: the article says "Having placed the fresnel lens, we're not able to get an usable image on the whole 40x30cm sensor." but I think the "not" should be "now". Having "not" reverse the meaning of the critical sentence!
- pixelpoet 6mo agoThey also keep saying definitively instead of definitely :)
- niccolove 6mo agoSorry, I promise I'll spend more time spell checking my articles from now on.
- pixelpoet 6mo agoIt's no problem really, and thanks for the great article! I'm actually simulating lenses at work right now so this is topical and very interesting. Spellcheck wouldn't help here because definitively is also a word, just not the "write" one :)
- wao0uuno 6mo agoBro discovered large format cameras. Yeah I didn't read the whole thing. Edit: Some examples: https://sandyphimester.com https://sandyphimester.com This really is nothing new.
- niccolove 6mo agoWell, obviously large format cameras are nothing new. The point here is: for these kind of apertures and wide angles we need a super large area to expose, and usually either (a) they're smaller with digital cameras, or (b) they use film and thus cannot record videos. This is specifically the approach that uses a depth of field adapter to be able to record videos on these, which is also not new (I provided references at the end of the article), but it is quite rare! Also, each design of there depth of field adapters is quite different and I think it's interesting to see the differences between them all.
- wao0uuno 6mo agoI guess it's pretty interesting for video but still not sure about calling it next-level. This look is as old as photography itself.
- niccolove 6mo agoThe title is a reference to diy perks, who has built the same camera and called it a "next-level" camera in its YouTube video. Thus, 'I built _the_ "next-level" camera' instead of a '_a_ "next-level"' camera :-)
- throwanem 6mo agoAre none of the images meant to load on mobile? I have to assume not, since without them I can't make sense of the article.
- vile_wretch 6mo agoSony uses a particularly narrow lens mount. A wider aperture would be easier with Canon RF or Nikon Z mounts (Nikon Z having the widest throat diameter and the shortest flange distance among full frame cameras).
- shen 6mo agoBecause the e mount was designed for apsc that they brute forced into making compatible with full frame.
- hencq 6mo agoWhat a great writeup! I really enjoyed reading the whole process and problem solving approach. This is why I come to Hacker news.
- hyperific 6mo agoInteresting that he explored wax as an interstitial "image sensor" medium. Given the low melting point of wax you would risk part of your camera melting during hot days, or the wax gradually settling on the bottom from heating and cooling cycles. Kudos to him for exploring it though! The leftover wax could supply a small candle making operation.
- buildbot 6mo agoSensors this large do exist! https://www.servethehome.com/stmicroelectronics-makes-a-18k-big-sky-sensor-so-large-only-four-on-a-300mm-wafer/ https://www.servethehome.com/stmicroelectronics-makes-a-18k-... There’s also (maybe) http://largesense.com http://largesense.com
- lytfyre 6mo agothat STMicroelectronics is 8.31cm by 9.92cm. That's _massive_ by digital sensor terms, but still pretty far off the 42cm by 29cm OP's effectively using.
- Tepix 6mo agoFrom TFA: > My camera sensor size is 35mm by 24mm. Multiplied by 12, we get 420mm by 288mm. That's, uh, 42cm by 29cm. It's, like, pretty big. That's the size of a painting you'd hang on your wall. This gives us two issues: > Firstly, such a sensor simply doesn't exist. … The Vera Rubins telescope camera has a diameter of 64cm! <https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vera-rubin-observatory-digital-camera https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vera-rubin-observatory-d...>
- echoangle 6mo agoThat’s not a single CCD though. That’s an array of multiple smaller sensors that are next to each other, but there will be gaps where they meet. They take multiple pictures and combine them to make a regular image of the sky, something you probably can’t really do for photography (or videography of course).
- ratmeadow 6mo agoThis thing is amazing. The kind of nasty extreme optics I love to see. Good stuff! The final images are pretty gorgeous. I'd love to shoot on this thing
- webrot 6mo agoWow this is pretty cool. I loved the images at the end!