David Sekanina

chuckle..this solution is rather silly :lol:

well I tried, if I want to use C-mount lenses I'll use the Kodak camera

the opening on the hard front is large enough so I could probably create an C-mount adapter that protrudes inwards. It'll look rather weird :)

EDIT: and there are a few ultra wide 16mm PL lenses. I know of: a 6mm Zeiss and an Optex 5.5mm

Thanks everybody for their input.

After modifying the CAD assembly using an M-mount, the camera grew quite in size - gone was the idea of a tiny mechanical marvel :) (screenshot)

So I decided to bite the bullet and go with a hard front at 36mm to 40mm so any mount with a larger FFD (Canon EF 44mm, Nikon F 46.5mm, Leica R 47mm, Arri PL 52mm) can sit on that hard front.

C-mount therefore is not an option anymore

Hi Daniel

Very generous of you, but if I decide to go with a PL mount (that thing is huge on the tiny Y8 body :) ), I'd go with a hard front design like I did on the Y2 instead of mounting it onto the front camera housing. Cannibalizing your mount would be more of a hassle than me machining a new one to the dimensions needed to fit the hard front. But thank you.

Hi Daniel - yes the PL mount would at least give the option to use some 16mm wide angle lenses. Alternatively I'm looking into the Leica M mount - but the widest non fisheye lens I found was a Voigtländer 10mm.

Thank you Jean-Loius and Heikki for the lens infos!

Heikki, I'll join as soon as I have a working prototype (no earlier than April) - till then it's just a silly project I spend oodles of time and money on because I truly enjoy it :lol:

@Nicholas

The spinning mirror is the same concept you'll find in all Arri and Aaton and many other film cameras - it's angled at 50 degrees, not at 45 to give me more room for the ground glass and the prisms above the mirror, like on the Aatons. The steps are there for the same reason you have steps inside lens hoods and lens barrels - it prevents light being reflected back creating ghost images because flat black anodized don't absorb all light. PL mount might be an overkill for this camera - although it would give me much less of a headache, because the FFD would be much bigger and I'd have more room for everything :)

The other camera (Y2) is an old project of a 2/3" digital cinema camera I worked on from 2006-2009...time flies - the Swiss company that developed the quadcore embedded platform that went into the camera was bought by a bigger competitor and the announced module I was waiting for got cancelled :/

It also had a spinning reflex mirror for the Aaton optical viewfinder.

The Y8 I'm working on right now (the black mock-up in the pic) will have a Maxon brushless servo - pull-down mechanism very similar to an Aaton. No register pin.

My background - I started as an industrial designer and now work as a senior mechanical engineer. I owned and serviced an Arri 16BL, SR3, Aaton LTR7. My father was an opto-electronics engineer and owned and repaired 16mm high-speed cameras, built big wooden cameras and collected camera curiosities from the former USSR - guess I caught his bug :)

Back to my question - you think I'd limit the camera too much with the lens dimensions I described?

EDIT: oh I forgot - I joined the forum as there are a few people who have a profound knowledge in Super8 cameras and I might ask them from time to time how much torque in mN the slip clutch on their cameras measure...things like that :)

Yes, with Kodak breathing new life into the format I thought it might be fun to to develop a more silent one :)

Hi

For a camera project I don't want to exceed the dimension of the spinning mirror (and therefore the overall width of the camera body) so I ended up with a solution that accepts C-mount lenses with a barrel diameter of max 40mm (for the first 10mm from the mount forward) and can't have lens elements that protrude more than 8mm inwards into the camera.

Do many of your favorite Super8 lenses exceed these dimensions? I found a few zoom and wide angle lenses that would not fit, but a vast majority would.

Hi all

Carl Looper explained it beautifully why there's a ground glass to pick up the reflected image of the spinning or oscillating mirror.

There isn't a lot of space due to the C-mount's short FFD - cramming in a sensor at the orange line (ground glass) is nearly impossible - unless you engineer and manufacture you own camera module.

Having an optical system that images the GG image allows the sensor module to be moved to a location where more space is available.