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A British man has constructed his personal lens with an excellent quick 35mm f/0.4 equal bokeh that’s constructed round an outdated episcope projector lens and a mechanical system for controlling focus.
Matt Perks, aka DIYPerks, is a tinkerer who doesn’t purchase something he can’t construct. On his YouTube channel, Perks has constructed all the things from a DIY 4K dwelling cinema projector to a DIY microphone for recording audio in his home-built studio with home-built video lights.
On this case, Perks turned his consideration to a classic episcope lens harvested from an outdated artwork projector. An episcope projector was very talked-about within the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies and would match over a bit of artwork or any object {that a} person would need to challenge onto a wall or display. They had been widespread in faculties on account of their low price and vivid projected picture, which was gained by shining gentle throughout the projector housing, down in direction of the topic. The sunshine would then mirror off a mirror and thru the episcope lens onto the wall.
As Perks admits, episcopes have largely been left behind by the regular march of know-how into the digital realm which he clearly sees as an actual disgrace as a result of the episcope lens provides a exceptional bokeh due to its extremely massive picture subject — on the order of 500mm. To place that in perspective, the usual smartphone digicam picture sensor has a picture circle of roughly eight millimeters, or 0.016 the scale.
To attain the aim of utilizing the episcopic lens together with his digicam, Perks must create an enormous housing and focusing mechanism from scratch. And even then, the biggest obstacle to capturing a picture, is that there isn’t a digital picture sensor made that’s massive sufficient to seize the complete picture circle the episcope lens can provide.
One choice could be to seize the picture as it’s being projected off the wall, however that comes with its personal set of picture high quality points from distortion to noise. To not point out it could forestall any form of cell use in any respect.
The opposite choice could be to challenge the picture onto an opaque floor after which seize the picture from that. This opened up the opportunity of taking the array nearly wherever if the design was moveable sufficient.
Perks used a diffuser sandwiched between two items of acrylic after which constructed round a pyramid-shaped aluminum housing as a customized gentle display. Two, truly: one to carry the episcope lens, and one for his Canon R5 full-frame mirrorless digicam. He then added a Fresnel lens in between to remove undesirable vignetting.
With an origami folded black bellows to dam out as a lot adjoining gentle as attainable, and a 3D printed joystick focusing mechanism to regulate the complete system, Perks was prepared to check out his cumbersome, but attention-grabbing array. The outcomes can greatest be described as trying extra like a direct sensor picture, quite than capturing a mirrored image from an opaque floor.
The episcope lens optically produces a dreamlike picture with unbelievable background separation. Perks labored out that his customized lens array has a crop issue of 0.08 and an aperture of f/0.4, which Perks claims makes his rig twice as quick as a $200,000 Zeiss 50mm f/0.7. The array even works with a smartphone, creating an optical bokeh way more pure than the simulated replication as we speak’s handsets produce via computational pictures.
The entire price to construct his DIY “Perkiscope” episcope lens array is barely $200. Perks has promised a obtain hyperlink for all of the plans to construct an episcope digicam rig of your personal, however on the time of publication, it had not but appeared within the video description. Even armed with these directions, the lens itself often is the hardest factor to supply for the challenge on account of its classic nature.
Picture credit: All photographs by Matt Perks
