Reply With QuoteNot sure that its that practical
Why not just buy a digital camera ?
I know there's a fair bit of interest in cameras here AND in Kickstarter projects and wondered if anyone had see this one?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...ority-function
Any thoughts on it, if so?
I really like the idea, but I wonder how practical it really is?
M.
Breitling Cosmonaute 809 - What's not to like?
Not sure that its that practical
Why not just buy a digital camera ?
Pretty cool to use some old retro cameras and not have to pay for the film..
Probably up there with the Yashica Y35...
I remember that idea being touted about 20 years ago. I do still have a couple of 35mm cameras I'd like to use but I doubt many people do.
I have a few, hence my interest :)
Why not use a digital camera? Well, if you have an investment in quality 35mm lenses then it could save a lot of money and it's just fun in a way - Like most things, old cameras were made to last (lots of brass, rather than plastic) and can be repaired; modern ones are disposable.
Obviously it's not for the average holiday snapper or anyone who has made the investment in decent digital cameras and has no interest in 35mm stuff, but judging by the amount (and some of the prices) of stuff on eBay there's a decent amount of interest.
I'm rather tempted to try one of their Medium Format backs on something like a Mamiya!
M
Breitling Cosmonaute 809 - What's not to like?
Leica did something similar back in the day for the R8.
Never seen this before and no doubt it is a very clever thing, but it looks huge on that Zenit. I can't see me ever attaching it to my old Olympus om2. The appeal of using an old camera is in the ergonomics and, lets be honest, what the camera looks like.
If i ever fancy using an old film camera I use black and white film, easily developed at home and then scanned to print. Works for me.
So ergonomic, doesn't ruin the original design at all
I'd love for this to work, I have several nice Nikkors I'd like to dust off.
Having said that, I'm not sure if I could cope with the additional bulk at the rear of the body.
I've read through their internet site and am not much wiser
How much does it cost, and
what size is the sensor?
A much neater and smaller version of this was around over 20 years ago but I doubt it actually made it into production. It was all inside a standard 35mm film canister with an extension on the side for the sensor, so it fitted neatly into any 35mm SLR. I guess that the practicalities of making it work with various SLRs and the cost meant it was doomed. I doubt that there is any serious market for this type of device anymore. I can't bear to throw out my old Pentax ME Super SLR though, it is a thing of beauty.
A significant part of the appeal of 35mm Film cameras is the aesthetics .... this reminds me of “The Homer” car design.
Those not motivated by the aesthetics are likely drawn by the analogue processes of film development and print.
..... in short, no.
Yes, I still have two of them. Like the Fender Stratocaster, the Citroen DS and (of course) the IWC MkXII, it is a design classic.Originally Posted by Gruntfuttock
Excellent! I often thought it would be great if someone could do that!
That was the thought I had but no idea whether it would be possible. Obviously it would make it a far neater solution with fewer model compatibility issues.
Last edited by David_D; 6th May 2020 at 09:22.
It's an utterly ridiculous idea and doomed to failure.
The only way this could possible work is the previously mentioned 35mm cannister with film plate addition to go into the camera back. This idea has been talked about since I started shooting with digital cameras over 20 years ago and no-one to my knowledge has been successful with this sensible concept to date.
"I'm back" says the marketing - yes the Kodak NC2000 look from 1994..well done there
Last edited by vulcangascompany; 6th May 2020 at 00:34.
Knew I’d seen something like it before, thank you for me no longer having to hunt my mind for it.
Completely agree that without it changing the overall form & feel of the camera it really will struggle.
No, thank you. I have considered a digital back for the RB67 or 645 a few times, but I'd much rather spend the money on film, a simple darkroom, and a good scanner. Part of the appeal of film, for me, is the process and how every frame matters — it forces me to slow down and really be in the moment I'm trying to capture. I don't get that with digital.
Maybe that back is cheap, but it's also one of the ugliest things I've ever seen attached to a camera.
Yeah, I think on balance, it's a non-starter for 35mm, it's probably (as most have said) just too bulky to work.
I'd agree on the aesthetics/ergonomics of 35mm SLRs (Interestingly, when I was 18 I rejected the Pentax ME/MX as I felt it was just TOO compact to feel comfortable in my hand and my parents bought me a Chinon CE-4, which served me well for decades and I still have) and this looks like a NIKON F2/3 with the super fast motor drive.
I'm still interested in the concept for Medium format cameras, though.
Cost for the universal 35mm version, just for completeness, is 299CHF on Kickstarter. Sensor is a Panasonic 34112, giving up to 14M pixels.
M
Breitling Cosmonaute 809 - What's not to like?
And those Nikkors can fit straight onto a Nikon DSLR or any mirrorless camera with an adapter (of which just about any lens/lens mount combination are available)
I would imagine you could pick up a second hand body for less than the cost of this bulky monstrosity and enjoy a superior user experience and results.
So the idea is to resurrect old film cameras by attaching a (huge) digital back that will enable the user to take digital images and videos? Why??
Firstly, most film cameras were built like tanks and all you need to do is find someone to do a CLA and it'll be working absolutely fine. Why would anyone want to use an analogue camera to take digital stills? Film is completely different to digital and has its own characteristics which appeal to many people (myself included). The digital back looks larger than an analogue camera battery grip but is damn ugly.
If you want to shoot film just buy a film camera. If you want to shoot digital...etc etc
A waste of time in my view. Take a heavy(ish) well made metal camera from 40 years ago and make it even more unwieldy by adding a massive back to it.
I still have a couple of old Nikon film cameras that I won't sell and occasionally run a roll of film through them.
The great thing about Nikon is you can put a 50 year old lens on a brand new digital SLR. If I wanted to use old lenses for digital I'd pick up a 3-4 year old pro or semi-pro SLR body. I don't think sensor technology has moved on that much from a few years ago and that way you would get the best of both worlds.
The Leica / Imacon / Kodak partnership produced the Leica Digital Module R first announced in 2003 ... a digital back for the Leica R8 and R9 manufactured in 2003 - 2005 (2000 units only)
https://www.apotelyt.com/photo-camera/leica-r9
I bought a s/h DMR 10 years ago and it's still used occasionally - one of the few survivors in working condition:
There is still a demand for s/h DMRs but rechargable batteries are unavailable. My batteries have been re-celled by Michael Bass in the USA. The camera uses 2Gb SD cards which are sufficient for 98 images ... almost equivalent to approx 3 rolls of film.
One of my DMR images:
The DMR was specifically designed to image with Leica R lenses - which are fairly telecentric compared to e.g. Leica M lenses. The DMR has a 1.37 crop factor and images have good edge resolution.
Every time I decide to sell mine I hesitate ... its ergonomics are superb and I can carry it via the hand grip (thus one hand only) all day long.
dunk
"Well they would say that ... wouldn't they!"
Do you have any pictures of the devices? I remember reading about them in the electronics press, but they always seemed to lag behind mass produced digital cameras in terms of resolution.
A few words on film vs digital ( for reference I worked at the digital imaging / VFX wing of Eastman Kodak for about 10 years and have worked in the film industry for 25 years ).
Film only outperforms digital in one area and that is colour ( gamut) . The dye packs that film uses seems to produce slightly more detail in more important parts of the color range relative to digital.
If you look at it on a chart then the latest digital cameras can describe a larger gamut than film in theory but in practice film just seems to produce nicer colors for human beings .
This might just be down to the originators of professional film stock (Eastman Kodak mainly) honing the film's colour response using a more meeaningful selection of real world human beings over time relative to the digital guys.
Around about the time that the digital professional motion picture cameras were coming out ( Arri , Red , Sony mainly) the most striking difference between film was in the colour .
All the cameras were capable of shooting more dynamic range than film ( 12 stops vs 10 stops for film negative) but the colour looked awful on
Red ( very washed out with a predominately cyan / red response)
Arri ( much nicer looking than Red but still a bit weak , funnily enough it had almost the exact same gamut response as Red but Arri seemed to have tuned it better for human eyeballs..this eventually made them the market leader along with better more traditional camera ergonomics)
Sony ( superior colour which gets close to film but the cameras are less like film cameras like Arri and more like video cameras , I also found they didn't like hot shooting environments , workflow is more convoluted )
Today Arri has by far the biggest share of the market and most films are shot on some model fo Arri Alexa , Red is second and often used for crash cameras and drone cameras , sony seems to be the less well used although I still think the image is about the best.
In comparison to 35mm film all the digital cameras have better dynamic range characteristics , 12 stops plus vs 10 stops ).
Arri has a nice aesthetic look relative to 35mm and the other cameras that has found favour with many eminent director's of photography and I have to say I generally agree , Red has improved its colour response hugely to the point where its competative with Arri , Sony still has colour which is superior to anything and almost indistinguishable from 35mm).
Christopher Nolan often remarks that he shoots on film and preferes to do a lab grade rather than a digital "DI" color grading stage however if you know how to restrict the colour operations you can mathematically mimic a lab grade in a DI quite accurately ( limit to RGB additive colour offsets relative to log and RGB multiplications offsets relative to linear working colorspaces).
When it comes to digital stills cameras the same rules apply albeit I usually have to shoot a chip chart to adequately plot the cameras response curve relative to real world stops. I used to develop my own film and prints and I won't go back to that in preference to digital. Even a mid level Canon consumer camera has better imaging characteristics than film and I'm totally happy with the ergonomics of Canon DSLRs over the last 15 years or so.
But generally despite my fondness for film I would happily never shoot with it again and even on 35mm film projects I specify a digital camera ( usually an Arri Alexa) for all technical plate shoots just to avoid the hassle of changing mags after 400ft.
And then it gets scanned which will have its own colour gamut so a bit of a moot point if it’s colour space is remapped.Film only outperforms digital in one area and that is colour ( gamut)
And film doesn’t push very well when it’s graded and they track a mask on a face that’s too dark, had this on a film last night, no d-max in the face and washed out as they pushed it too much. The sort of issue that could be solved with greater dynamic range or being able to view on a proper monitor at the time of capture.
Why do you think they miss focus so much with film :-)
Well film Negative is generally scanned according to density records in RGB. As its negative it really only gets its notional colorspace by virtue if the rendering intent its graded in.
If its graded subjectively on a rec.709 display then its rec.709 colourspace.
If its graded on P3 then its P3 colorspace. The data itself of the scan is agnostic to its end colorspace.
35mm Digital film scans gave been essentially transparent back to the original negative since about 1993. If you read the cineon spec you‘ll see it targets all the dynamic range from the neg in each rgb record. 4k is essentially transparent to the grain structure ( ie the pixels are smaller than the grain structure ).
Film negative is about 10.5 stops of dynamic range. Most real world images only contain about 9 stops of useful dynamic range max that can be dispkayed meaningfully . If you can’t get 35mm negative exposed with that available latitude tolerance the problem is likely not best fixed by going to a camera with 12stops or more !
Film negative is designed with About 3 stops of headroom in the whites assuming nominal exposure . The idea is to overexpose to get the black detail up above the toe of the film where it will register with better variation. The heavy neg is then printed down to restore contrast whilst the headroom in the whites will become visible rather than clipping. So the paradigm is to improve the blacks by providing range in the whites to print down with.
Another thing not handled well by colorists is many tend to have no meaningful baseline look to the footage as a starting point like a 1 light print simulation. That way they can grade in terms of stops and lights rather than just contrast and gamma bends till they eyeball something they like. Much better to start with meaningful stops displayed in a predictable way then adjust from there with offsets and leave the curves and secondary windows until its absolutely necessary to fix a mistake.
Likewise if a focus puller needs to rely on looking at a 4k display more than measuring and preparing their distance marks then the problem isn’t really the shooting format.
Advances sometimes take time to become practical. I remember when the first Go Pro came out.........................
Started out with nothing. Still have most of it left.
Needs more devolopment, it looks off to me. Far too big and bulky.
IMO you're better off just buying a Lecia M8, or similar.
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