Poor man's DOF rig?

[Elliot Lucak]

A while ago my crappy camcorder started to break [tripod socket got chewed and the front case of the lens broke off how the fu] and considering how useless it is I figured I'd do a little experiment that I've always wanted to try.

I never personally cared much for dof adapters as they are so cumbersome and you lose a ton of detail and light in the process [IMO], so I figured I'd do the logical thing and just take the horrible plastic lens out and mount a 35mm system lens right onto the damn camcorder.




Well, the crop factor is insane to say the least... Converts a 50mm into a 320mm lens, and turns my 200mm into a 1280mm [!!!] lens.
To those that say mounting a 35mm system lens won't affect the dof because of the sensor, I don't know where you're pulling that from because I have to stop my lenses down to F22 to get the same dof that I got with the stock lens, and the stock lens is faster then many of my lenses.
That is to say, you get some real nice [shallow] DOF, which is amplified by the crop factor and perspective compression to make the background seem even more blurred.



[for reference, the sensor is 6.72mm diagonal.]

That being said this is little other then an experiment I did for fun.
I don't encourage doing something stupid like this unless you have a camcorder you really don't care about and you're really bored, because this is like polishing a turd, to say. Feed the camcorder the sharpest, fastest lenses and it will still rape the image with it's eye-gougingly bad compression and autoexposure.

Also that image with the 200mm mounted was a joke.

[dop16mm]

I've toyed with the idea of doing something like this to use my 16mm lenses. There are some cheap cameras that have a sensor that is very close to the right size, but what is the point without manual controls or 24p. If only Nikon had put 24p on the 1 series, oh well. How hard is it to even allow exposure lock in video mode, come on.

[Elliot Lucak]

I definitely would've mounted much smaller lenses like 16mm c-mount lenses but I don't have any.
Yeah it sucks not having even at least an exposure lock, if you could adjust the exposure and bitrate of the camcorder it could definitely be a nice little camera. IMO framerate is negligible, exposure is most of the 'filmic look'.
The best you can do is face detect which doesn't work half the time because it can't even detect the face because it's over\underexposed fuuu