film camera shutter tester

[bergytone]

Hello all, I know you aren't supposed to promote or sell things in the forum, but a new kickstarter was launched today for a handheld film camera shutter speed tester. This is something that I know I need for my various rangefinders. Head on over to Kickstarter and type in "shutter tester" in the search box.

 

[hanskerensky]

Hello all, I know you aren't supposed to promote or sell things in the forum, but a new kickstarter was launched today for a handheld film camera shutter speed tester. This is something that I know I need for my various rangefinders. Head on over to Kickstarter and type in "shutter tester" in the search box.

He is busy quite some time (and also was in touch with me) to get a thorough result. Let's hope he managed to do that.

Here is Eric's Flickr Album about that shutter tester :
https://www.flickr.com/photos/20217676@N08/albums/72157665181602612

 

[johnf04]

Thomas Thomosy, in his first camera repair book, had a simple analogue shutter speed tester - you use it with a high input resistance voltmeter, and calibrate it with a known good shutter.

 

[Sarcophilus Harrisii]

Thomas Thomosy, in his first camera repair book, had a simple analogue shutter speed tester - you use it with a high input resistance voltmeter, and calibrate it with a known good shutter.

True, but this one promises (potentially) to be rather more useful to the repairer. For starters, the ability to determine curtain speeds of first and second curtains of a focal plane shutter makes the process of assessing and then correcting the times, and particularly uneven exposures, that much quicker and easier. Either for vertical or horizontal travel shutters. I've got my eye on one. I'm naturally suspicious of kickstarter projects in general (they are, by definition, a bit of a punt), but may well purchase one when they hit the market.
Cheers,
Brett

 

[Denverdad]

I decided to pull the trigger on this yesterday and became a backer. Kind of unusual for me since I normally build stuff like this myself, but I thought this device had a very nice feature set including a great display and surprisingly clean and functional packaging for the price. Given the amount of effort it would have taken for me to duplicate this I felt it was a good value (early bird special was $99 + $10 shipping for basic kit).

As for the features, I especially like the graphical display of the waveform as I think it adds confidence to the measurement in a way that simply looking at a number doesn't. This could prove very helpful for example in troubleshooting subtle mechanical problems with the shutter. The calibration check feature should build confidence too.

The stand-alone operation (i.e., not needing to hook up a computer, scope, or to do any additional processing) is a great convenience. So too is being able to quickly generate max, min, and average values and to display all the measurements at once. These features encourage collecting multiple measurements which I think is valuable for getting a sense of how repeatable the shutter speeds actually are (sometimes not very!).

One feature that I suspect others might not think is a big deal is the real-time display of the intensity level. Keeping a detector out of saturation is in my opinion an often overlooked requirement for accurate shutter speed measurement, and I think the way he has implemented the level indicator here should make this an easy check. Finally, I really appreciate that (according to his website) you're not tied to the supplied light source but can use pretty much any light source of your own design.

... at present the Kickstarter is about two backers away from meeting its goal.

 

[bergytone]

Thanks Denverdad for the support. You and I talked on APUG about paper negative enlargers a while back.

You are right, keeping the sensors out of saturation is important to making a good measurement. I came up with this thing because I got sick and tired of dragging out the scope and wiring things up every time I wanted to check a shutter. And because I use dozens of different cameras (just did the pad of death on a Yashica GSN) having my own hand held gadget was a big help. I use the thing a lot, especially on the box cameras.

There is a lot more to getting accurate readings than hooking up a photodiode to your microphone jack on your PC. The ambient light sensor I use is specifically made to be used in the visible light spectrum and that allows any light source to be used. i even used a laser pointer as a light source. It was WAY to bright, but it worked!

Another use I found was to evaluate flash performance. The sensor can resolve light pulses as fast as 1/10,000 second, as evident by my calibration check mode, which blinks the LED at 100 microsecond pulse length. I was checking out flashes today, and there is a huge variance between flash units. I was even able to determine the flash sync speed of an old Pentax K1000 with it.

I can understand not feeling good about Kickstarter projects, but as long as there are no parts availability issues I'm confident I can deliver. Thanks for backing it... keep an eye on the updates.