I had an email from Carolyn from Camera Fusion to say that she is following this thread.
I'm itching to buy this, my LF experiments so far have shown that consumer scanners are a waste of time and using polaroid 55 to save on processing results in a neg with which I have almost no control (try using a red filter with an early morning filter factor 16 on an iso 24 film in low light at f32 to hold the sky!) is a proof that there is no free lunch!
A digital stitching solution would give the choice of using it for static subjects at little cost or switching to film holders where I need to freeze movement. That way I don't have to pay for a drum scan every time to capture the same amount of information and coupled with HDR techniques I can have as much control over the contrast as I could ever want.
That said there are several issues which I can see would cause problems and would like to know answers to before I spent this kind of money.
A 135mm lens on a 6X9 frame (the minimum they consider useful) equals a 50mm on FF. Not wide but not too bad, that together with my 210mm gives a nice 50mm and 85mm equivelent. They say that there is a wide angle converter on the way, I am worried about just how much it will cost!
They don't recommend vertical use. For me this is a huge issue. Why a tightening screw couldn't have been used for the horizontal movement (to stop it sliding in vertical) is beyond me. Not many shoot pano's in vertical but surely most people are not spending this much to be limited to horizontal panos!
Using the math on their website, when cropping my full frame 5D to APS sensor size to kill the vignetting caused by the adapter, you are left with just 4.9 megapixels. Even with stitching across to compensate, with a 6X9" frame (2:3 crop) you get 'only' 77 megapixels. Crop it to a traditional 4:5 ratio and it will only drop.
Now although this is a lot less than advertised I would venture that as the 5D can only resolve approx 50 lp/mm and the best non digitar LF lenses can only manage 70 lp/mm, you aren't actually going to get much better than 100 megapixels of resolution anyway. Given that LF film is considered to be the equivelent of a 60 megapixel bayer sensor (Jack Flesher correct me if I'm wrong) this is pretty good.
There doesn't seem to be any data on how much shift/rise/fall can be used with the adaptor, if the adaptor already vignettes to APS then I would be worried that it isn't that much before there will be significant light loss at the edges due to the mirror box.
There really is not much data on their website, for example Asher's example of the train shows significant slop in the movement, I would need to know that once locked down in the vertical axis, the horizontal movement is smooth and does not have any sag that would necessitate more overlap and stitching time. Similarly someone has pointed out that the vertical movement seems like it would need repositioning of the camera to keep everything straight.
If I would need to crop my FF images to APS size then I would want to know that I'm not loosing that part from the sides of the image, i.e. that I can position the camera so that the start of the image from the edge is 'clean' not that I then have to crop off from the edges. This would be a pain in the neck with compostion and reduct the megapixels and resolution still further. I have a significant investment in FF cameras and really do not want to significantly increase my expenditure on this adapter by having to change bodies as well.
The ground glass adapter has very little data shown about it, is the ground glass user replaceable? Does is include a fresnel? Can I get it with grid lines etc?
It's unfortunate that living in the UK and this being a new product I do not have the chance of being able to see it in the flesh, I'm sure if I could see it working and speak to a salesperson I would be able to aswer the above questions in under ten minutes. As it is, for all my interest this would be significant investment (the adapter, changing my camera back, buying a 135mm) so you can understand why I'm rather interested in these points!
To Carolyn and Asher in advance many thanks,
Ben
