Nice to see so many comments.
Bill P: Thanks for pointing out the related thread.
Frankie: Interesting notes. As far as I'm concerned, the simpler, the better. I'd happily sacrifice a bunch of features on most of my cameras.
40 oz: If I had already assembled the prototype, I would have been more than proud to post my results and share the info. But since it was just an idea based on curiosity, and given my lack of technical expertise, I thought it might be relevant to ask for the opinion of experienced people.
When I find a suitable P&S digital throwaway, I'll try building the prototype. If it works, I'll see if the same can be done using the innards of a DSLR. Old Canon EOS bodies are approaching the £100 mark on the 2nd hand market, but of course my aim is to keep expenses as low as possible. Otherwise, I guess it won't be worth the effort.
I apologize if my replies were less than enthusiastic. I often think of using one of my Kiev's for an experiment.
My theory:
A) buy cheapest keychain digiacm from Walgreens/Target and gut it carefully without breaking any wires.
B) Mount the sensor and guts on the Kiev backpiece, and tape the controls to the outside.
C) Use the Kiev shutter, and at the same time press the camera's shutter button with my other thumb.
D) Read camera's memory card to see what I got.
I haven't done so yet because I don't have exrta cash. Arguably it's beer money, so my excuse is lame IMHO. Since I have a film scanner, I can't see it as better than film + scanner, so I have zero motication. But it's be a cool enough toy, even if the sensor was smaller than a postage stamp. Step Two would be buy an old DSLR for cheap and repeat as best as I can.
The key reason there are plenty of DSLR bodies but very few DRF bodies on the market is that digital sensors are effectively in a hole. Even with the DSLR design there are tons of posts regarding vignetting people didn't see with the same lens on film bodies. As much as some of us like to slam DSLR users as fools with a larger bank balance than brain capacity, the savvy DSLR users notice the very real drawbacks to digital sensors and wide angle lenses.
Considering how close the rear of the lens sits on a RF body - especially with wide lenses - the vignetting issue would be far worse. And given how many people heartily endorse the RF body strength in wide angle work, a digital sensor that increases vignetting as the lens gets wider negates the motivation to develop a digital RF IMHO. Technology isn't there to match what is possible with film.
The very strength of rf bodies is the fact that the lens is very close to the film. I doubt the real need for a digital rf given the availability of very capable film scanners. I would get behind an effort to lobby for better scanners long before I'd get behind a movement for another digital RF body.
I'm not a Luddite - computers are my bread and butter. But I'm not blind. I seriously don't see the advantage of a digital RF body. I can get C41 film developed and scanned within an hour, usually with a free CD of scans from Walgreens with a coupon. I still get my negatives, and I also get prints and a CD of scans. I can always rescan the film at my leisure. And for traditional B&W I develop and scan on my own time. I'm not under deadline pressure and I am able to get the best of both worlds - digital images but based on the film of my choice without dealing with sensor vignetting and my negatives aren't bound to the gamut of the camera body.
One thing people repeatly forget is that the color gamut of a DSLR is severely limited. I took a few pictures of a mall in Seward Alaska, featuring a bright yellow curved wall. The drugstore prints showed it adequately, but the drugstore scans showed it as a pale washed-out yellow. I scanned the negatives myself at 8-bit color, and got pretty much the same pale yellow. I rescanned at 16-bit color, and got a much more accurate brilliant yellow and all the other colors were still realistic and accurate. Someone taking that picture with a standard DSLR would have captured a very pale simulacrum of the actual scene, given the standard color gamut of a DSLR is 8-bit color. To adjust the DSLR image to show the brilliant wall as it exists would skew the other colors towards the unrealistic.
Digital sucks (to be eloquent lol) because it can only draw from a set pallete of colors. People forget that film isn't limited to a particular gamut. There are top and bottom cutoffs, but anything inbetween get captured as close to reality as the film can get. the subtle gradations between colors are all there because there is no limit to what can be captured within the range the film can deal with. It's a pure combination of red, green, and blue layers sensitive to subtle variations that will never make their way into digital sensors.
Digital is a stairway compared to a an analog ramp. Anyone attesting to the superiority of digital anything is demonstrating an ignorance of the very real difference of the two capture mechanisms (probalby better called "capture sciences.") I won't argue the time-to-press advantages for pro shooters, but I would argue the convenience factor for non-pros. As long as places like Walgreens offer one hour photo processing, there is no real digital convenience advantage. There is a one hour lag, but after the first hour, the advantage evaporates.
I guess the real reason I've never bothered to mount a cheap digicam sensor in a Kiev is I saw it as a step backwards. Cool enough, but I'd rather take pinhole photographs with 110 film cart and cardboard than digicam shots though a hacked Kiev.
But I still think a cheap digicam mounted in an FSU would be a fun toy and worth doing. Just try not to wreck a nicely functioning FSU body in the endeavor. They're nice cameras to use and I'd hate to see a single working model destroyed.
I encourage palying with technology. That's how breakthroughs are made. I'm not inherently anti-digital. I just feel like I'm the only one sometimes to acknowledge that hype does not equal reality. Film is a mture technology. Why would ANYONE think a new tech like digital photography would trump a mature technology in the space of a few years? One needs to look at the *facts* rather than marketing materials. Nobody at Canon would argue my points. No camera engineer at Nikon would dispute what I'm saying. But plenty of Pop Photo subscribers (and most of their columnists) would argue the point. Folks at leica would agree, and shake their heads at the folks who insist that Leica provide a digital RF option for them to spend their money on.
I'm not saying the curent DRF options are wastes of money, but they defeat the main strengths of the RF design - very little to zero vignetting with wides, highly acurate focussing for the highest resolution images on a rather small piece of film. Since a digital sensor uses at least three sensor pixels for each image pixel, you are giving away resolution for digital trendiness. They take nice pitcures, but a digital RF is hardly state of the art. It's a huge step back using an inferior format in a body that *could* deliver a superior image using film.
That's my story and i'm sticking to it
🙂
