ranger9
Well-known
Anybody want to see some more Pixii pics? As disclosed above, I did decide to keep the Pixii, and since then I've been trying to shoot with it as much as I can to come to grips with its peculiarities. I really ought to settle down and use the dratted thing for some more "normal" kinds of photography under decent light, but because of the time of year most of my Pixii shooting has been in low light (theater wings) in the ISO 5200 - 10,200 range.
Here are a few Nutcracker backstage pics from earlier today; I downsampled them for convenient viewing, so there's no point in getting too hair-splitting about noise structure (it's definitely visible, especially at ISO 10,200) or sharpness (I admit I'm discovering I've gotten a bit dependent on IBIS, which my other cameras have and the Pixii doesn't!) What I'm liking about these is that their tonal range has nice, open midtones and doesn't require a lot of post-processing to rescue shadow details. I shot all these with my modest little 7Artisans 35mm f/2 lens, which uses a Sonnar-type optical formula; the results kind of remind me of my old days shooting Tri-X with a Zeiss Contax IIa and 50/1.5 Sonnar, which always gave a look I liked.
(Gear question: If I want to get a faster 35, would Cosina's 35/1.4 Nokton be best for getting this sharp-but-still-vintage look, or is it just plain soft until stopped down?)
Pics:
Here are a few Nutcracker backstage pics from earlier today; I downsampled them for convenient viewing, so there's no point in getting too hair-splitting about noise structure (it's definitely visible, especially at ISO 10,200) or sharpness (I admit I'm discovering I've gotten a bit dependent on IBIS, which my other cameras have and the Pixii doesn't!) What I'm liking about these is that their tonal range has nice, open midtones and doesn't require a lot of post-processing to rescue shadow details. I shot all these with my modest little 7Artisans 35mm f/2 lens, which uses a Sonnar-type optical formula; the results kind of remind me of my old days shooting Tri-X with a Zeiss Contax IIa and 50/1.5 Sonnar, which always gave a look I liked.
(Gear question: If I want to get a faster 35, would Cosina's 35/1.4 Nokton be best for getting this sharp-but-still-vintage look, or is it just plain soft until stopped down?)
Pics:
- Uncle Drosselmeyer [black-and-white, ISO 5200] - My hand-holding technique at 1/30 isn't very good, is it? Still, I like the tonality. I used the camera's planar black-and-white mode for this.
- Spanish girl [color, ISO 5200] - Same stage location, but I used sRGB color mode for this. Yeah, I applied some noise reduction in Lightroom so she wouldn't look "gritty."
- Two dancers in blue [color, ISO 5200] - Nothing very dramatic, but I like how the darker colors don't "plug". I was able to shoot this one at 1/60, which helped my shaky-hands issue a bit.
- Hair touchup [color converted to b&w, ISO 10,200] - I had to bump up the ISO here and you can definitely see it's noisier, especially in the shadow area in back; doesn't bother me, though. I shot this in color mode, but didn't like the green cast I was getting from the lights, so I converted it to b&w. One advantage of this, which I would have lost if I had used the Pixii's planar b&w mode, was that I could adjust the tonal balance based on the various colors of lights.
willie_901
Mentor
Aliasing artifacts from LED technologies using pulse-width modulation are unavoidable when using a rolling shutter (mechanical or electronic). On some circumstances the aliasing artifacts ;evels can be minimized, but they are never eliminated. In some cases a different shutter time may help. Correlating artifact levels to differences in LED technologies is not easy. In situations were when a scene is lit by multiple, pulse-width modulation LED lights, the modulation for different lights is almost always out of phase. This means aliasing artifacts levels can be quite low compared to results from a single, identical light. For this reason, well-designed tests will not be very useful.
Godfrey
somewhat colored
To me, the 'readout scan distortions' of an eshutter are just another camera characteristic that gets in the way of some things but can be creatively used to advantage in other things. A simple way of seeing it is just to fix the camera to a tripod and take a photo of a moving object against a static background so you can see how much bend or distortion the eshutter produces.
For example, the 907x eshutter has a nominal 300ms readout speed. To see what that means about capturing motion, I fixed the camera to a tripod and set 1/1000 second, then photographed this house with a car passing in front of it at about 35-40 mph:
That tells me about what to expect in shearing with the eshutter pretty simply.
G
ranger9
Well-known
Should come in handy for those wanting to reproduce the aesthetic of the early Jacques-Henri Lartigue: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283256 The fact that the race car "leans" forward while the spectators in the background "lean" backward implies that Lartigue was panning at about half the speed of the car, which was pretty going going considering this was 1913 and Lartigue would have been 19 years old at the time! [The Schneider Grand Prix car in the picture could exceed 100mph, and it looks as if Lartigue was even closer to it than Godfrey was in his street scene, suggesting that Lartigue was kind of nuts...]
Taking a look at Godfrey's example photo, based on assuming the average US residential street lane is about 10 feet wide (those in metric countries substitute about 3 meters) then I am going to guess he was about 25 feet away from the car, and if it was traveling at 40mph that would be about 59 feet per second. Given that the diameter of a circle with radius 25 feet is about 157 feet, then the car would move through an angle of about 134 degrees per second, or about 40 degrees during the Hasselblad's putative 300ms scan time, which seems to align pretty well with an "eyeball" measurement of the skew angle of the back of the car.
So, this seems to be a fairly good rough-and-ready way to measure scan times, assuming you know how fast the cars are likely to travel on your neighborhood streets and can measure how far away from them you are. I'll see if that gives me any leads on experiments I can do with the Pixii...
Godfrey
somewhat colored
I was likely a little further from the car as I had a 135mm lens on the camera, and the car is across the parking lane and two right-bound lanes in the left hand lane of the left-bound lanes, plus a little distance back from the curb, but the numbers seem about right. I have other photos with people walking, kids riding bicycles, etc. They give me a feel for what I can get away with vs what creates too much distortion to be usable.
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cboy
Well-known
Yes please. Seems acceptable up to 5200 iso imo. Was trying to find comparison DR online but couldn't.
Can you describe the character of the rendering. It seems subtle / muted in a good way.
ranger9
Well-known
The rendering you get depends in part on which in-camera "profile" you choose. I'm still exploring this, as it is completely undocumented (like a lot of things about the Pixii) so the following is TOTALLY SPECULATIVE... but basically there are three profiles ("standard", "portrait", and "exterior") each of which comes in two variants (0 and 1) plus a "default" profile, which looks like generic Japanese-manufacturer rendering to me (e.g. oversaturated reds.)
All the other profiles are a bit more muted and to me more desirable: the "exterior" profiles are still bright and snappy, as you might want for photographing buildings and architecture; the "standard" and "portrait" profiles are increasingly more subtle. I like to use the "standard" profile when primarily photographing things and the "portrait" profile when primarily photographing people. The 0 and 1 variants seem to affect mostly the highlights, with 0 a bit more muted and 1 a bit more sparkly. I usually use the 0 variants in hopes of retaining highlight detail in difficult light, but I haven't done a lot of direct comparisons and I don't know how much difference it really makes.
I should point out that these profiles are all only subtly different -- you can still take your "portrait 0" DNG file and make the highlights snappier, for example -- and I don't really believe they're intended to be switched frequently, the way Fujifilm hopes you'll be switching film simulation modes, for example. I think the idea is more that you'll find a profile that gives the overall look you prefer, and use it most of the time... the way many of us pick a favorite film and usually stick to it.
It's also worth noting that the profiles are not simply "filters" that you can edit post-shoot, the way you can choose a different Fujifilm "film simulation" mode in Lightroom, for example. They are genuine lookup tables that affect the raw data that is written into the DNG files. You still have a lot of editing flexibility regardless of which profile you select, but your profile choice is baked in. So, I think a good way to work is to choose the one that gives an overall look you like, and then just leave it alone unless you have a specific reason to select another profile. If you do this, you won't need to do nearly as much post-production editing on your raw files, as they'll usually come out the way you like them.
There's a segment in my YouTube video that runs through the different profiles really quickly on a test scene, and if anybody is really interested I threw together my basic test photos in a Lightroom gallery that you can see here. There's no point in getting too hair-splitting about this, because obviously it isn't a wide-ranging test... mostly it should give you an idea of how much difference there is among the profiles (not much, but enough that most people probably will prefer one over another for most of their photography...
ranger9
Well-known
In my continuing quest to document stuff about the Pixii that Pixii SaS doesn't seem to document, I've been trying to pin down what the various white-balance settings mean in terms of Kelvin temperature. Currently there's no way to set a custom white balance from a white card or by entering a specific number of degrees K (although these capabilities are promised in a future software update) so I figure it's useful to know what the various settings do, right?
I used the following admittedly crude procedure to investigate this. (Suggestions for a better procedure are welcome as long as they don't require expensive measuring equipment.) I photographed a white wall in a room lit by diffused daylight -- first at the Auto setting, then at all the different named settings. Then I opened all the raw files in Lightroom and looked at what K number was shown in the color-temperature panel. What I got was this:
Later on I figured out a way to validate these numbers. I've gotten hold of one of those Godox ML60 bi-color LED lights, which can be set to color temperature values from 2800K to 6500K. (Of course since this is an LED light, these are simulated K values since they don't represent light from an actual hot object. But they're as close as you're going to get if you're lighting with LEDs... which is your main portable option for now, since the Pixii doesn't have flash sync, remember?) Anyway, I set up a test scene and shot it at each of the settings above, and with the light dialed in to a matching temperature. The results all matched each other (except for minor tint differences, since this particular Godox light doesn't have a tint adjustment) and all looked like a good approximation of "normal" color balance. The test photos are really boring, so I won't share them here unless anybody is desperate to see them, but you can take my word for it that the K values quoted above align reasonably well with our normal expectations of color when using digital cameras.
I used the following admittedly crude procedure to investigate this. (Suggestions for a better procedure are welcome as long as they don't require expensive measuring equipment.) I photographed a white wall in a room lit by diffused daylight -- first at the Auto setting, then at all the different named settings. Then I opened all the raw files in Lightroom and looked at what K number was shown in the color-temperature panel. What I got was this:
Auto -- 5500K, suggesting the auto setting is doing a good job of balancing the white to what we'd normally consider a "daylight" K value.
StdA -- 2,750K. This is a color temperature you might encounter in a room lit with old-fashioned incandescent lamps.
CFW -- 3,200K. This is the nominal temperature of "quartz lights" used in stage lighting and cinematography.
Daylight -- 4,000K. This is a lower (and consequently warmer) color temperature than we usually associate with "photographic daylight," which often is assumed to have a temperature of 5,000K or 5,600K. It might correspond to morning daylight, or to a sunny day with lots of white clouds. Or maybe it's just a French thing.
Flash -- Yes, there's a flash white-balance setting even though the Pixii has NO flash synchronization (at least not yet.) It also comes out to 4,000K, the same as the daylight setting, but has a slightly different tint value. Normally people often assume that flash color temperature is about 5,000K, so again the Pixii's number is lower/warmer than standard.
Cloudy -- This measures out at 4,350K.
Shade -- This measures out to 4,600K.
StdA -- 2,750K. This is a color temperature you might encounter in a room lit with old-fashioned incandescent lamps.
CFW -- 3,200K. This is the nominal temperature of "quartz lights" used in stage lighting and cinematography.
Daylight -- 4,000K. This is a lower (and consequently warmer) color temperature than we usually associate with "photographic daylight," which often is assumed to have a temperature of 5,000K or 5,600K. It might correspond to morning daylight, or to a sunny day with lots of white clouds. Or maybe it's just a French thing.
Flash -- Yes, there's a flash white-balance setting even though the Pixii has NO flash synchronization (at least not yet.) It also comes out to 4,000K, the same as the daylight setting, but has a slightly different tint value. Normally people often assume that flash color temperature is about 5,000K, so again the Pixii's number is lower/warmer than standard.
Cloudy -- This measures out at 4,350K.
Shade -- This measures out to 4,600K.
Later on I figured out a way to validate these numbers. I've gotten hold of one of those Godox ML60 bi-color LED lights, which can be set to color temperature values from 2800K to 6500K. (Of course since this is an LED light, these are simulated K values since they don't represent light from an actual hot object. But they're as close as you're going to get if you're lighting with LEDs... which is your main portable option for now, since the Pixii doesn't have flash sync, remember?) Anyway, I set up a test scene and shot it at each of the settings above, and with the light dialed in to a matching temperature. The results all matched each other (except for minor tint differences, since this particular Godox light doesn't have a tint adjustment) and all looked like a good approximation of "normal" color balance. The test photos are really boring, so I won't share them here unless anybody is desperate to see them, but you can take my word for it that the K values quoted above align reasonably well with our normal expectations of color when using digital cameras.
So basically it has daylight and cooler options?
Godfrey
somewhat colored
Sounds good, thanks for doing the research.
In my workflow, as long as a reasonably good Auto and a single fixed white balance are available, the rest is mostly irrelevant. With tools like LR Classic, for anything where I need WB over a number of frames to match, I set a fixed WB. Doesn't really matter which because I can select all the frames in LR click the WB tool, and set them all the same to what looks better after the fact. Easy.
I might ... MIGHT ... want to order one of these cameras after the turn of the year. A coupled optical range/viewfinder camera that takes my M-mount lenses would be useful for those times when the EVF in the Leica CL proves a bit awkward (bright sunny days where it gets difficult to see with... if I don't have a hat). As you can see, my "need" is somewhat under construction... LOL!
G
In my workflow, as long as a reasonably good Auto and a single fixed white balance are available, the rest is mostly irrelevant. With tools like LR Classic, for anything where I need WB over a number of frames to match, I set a fixed WB. Doesn't really matter which because I can select all the frames in LR click the WB tool, and set them all the same to what looks better after the fact. Easy.
I might ... MIGHT ... want to order one of these cameras after the turn of the year. A coupled optical range/viewfinder camera that takes my M-mount lenses would be useful for those times when the EVF in the Leica CL proves a bit awkward (bright sunny days where it gets difficult to see with... if I don't have a hat). As you can see, my "need" is somewhat under construction... LOL!
G
ranger9
Well-known
It doesn't even have a daylight option, if you consider "daylight" to be 5000K or 5600K as is the case on most digital cameras. The auto white balance will handle that, but you can't dial it in manually. Pixii's idea of daylight balance is 4000K, which is more like what most of us might consider "golden hour" balance and looks a bit chilly if used in typical US noon daylight. BUT... remember that this is a software-defined camera, meaning the whole thing can be "re-engineered" any time Pixii SAS decides to push out an over-the-air update. And Pixii support did tell me that options to set a custom white balance off a reference object such as a white card, or dial in a desired Kelvin value, definitely are in the works.
As Godfrey suggests, it's not a big problem anyway as long as you're shooting DNGs, which have plenty of latitude for color-balance correction. You can even do this while strolling around the boulevards, since the Snapseed mobile app has a nice white-balance dropper tool in its raw module. It might be more of a concern for JPEG shooters, but I'm not one of those...
ranger9
Well-known
Nerdy fun with Pixii
As confessed earlier, I did keep the Pixii and have been trying to shoot a lot with it to get used to it, and I have to say it's really kind of growing on me. Yes, the 0.67x finder is dinky compared to the 1.0x viewfinders I'm used to on my Epson R-D1, Bessa R3m, and Canon P, and sometimes it's a bit touchy to dial up the menu item I want using the in-finder menu display (but it's still better than any other RF camera with an in-finder menu display because there aren't any others, bwahahah...) But mostly it's enjoyable to handle, and I've been impressed with the images both in terms of overall quality and in how little post-production I have to do in Lightroom to get them to look the way I want.
Also, I admitted previously that part of my willingness to cough up the stiff price tag was that I was intrigued by the concept of a software-defined camera... and as I had hoped, I'm beginning to learn some of the tricks to doing nerdy computer stuff with it.
For example, it turns out that by making a couple of obscure menu selections, you can put the Pixii into a "system zone" mode that lets it mount on your computer with its system directories and config files visible. Obviously it would be possible to mung things up severely if you don't know what you're doing here, but it also lets you see some interesting stuff.
Among other things, it makes visible the Profiles directory where the camera's built-in color profiles live. It turns out that these are non-proprietary Adobe .dcp files [Digital Camera Profile] and you can create new ones using the Adobe DNG Profile Editor tool that's been around since 2012 (!) but still works fine. To use this tool, you copy an existing profile to use as a basis, and give it a new name; open your profile in the tool; then open a DNG image file you want to use as an example. Suppose if you like the turquoise skies and orangey skin tones seen on some ultra-popular hipster film-photography YouTube channels; you could open an image with a person and a sky. You'd then use a dropper tool to choose sample points in your photo, adjust their HSV values to your liking, and adjust curves and other useful stuff,. There's also a utility for generating a profile from a photo of a Macbeth Color Checker if you want to profile for a particular set of lighting conditions.
Once you're done, you name and export your new .dcp file -- e.g. Pixii Camera (A1571) Hipster Cinematic.dcp -- and then you can copy it into the Profiles folder in the PIXII directory. From there, once you've unmounted and restarted the camera, your new profile will be visible in the camera's Profiles menu, and you can choose it to have your photos pre-ruined – oops, I mean, pre-profiled with your unique personal visual brand – right out of the camera. (I realize you can apply .dcp profiles to any DNG file after-the-fact using various utilities, but this is a handier way to do it.)
Okay, I know, this kind of thing probably doesn't excite anybody except me, but I do remember someone else mentioning that the Pixii would be more interesting if users could define their own color profiles, so I thought I'd mention that it turns out you can.
Incidentally, in case you like the idea of Wi-fi but really hate the Pixii app, I learned that the camera has a very stripped-down HTTP server built into it, so you can just point a browser to the camera's IP address (shown in a menu) and then right-click from a list to download the DNG files you want. This is handy if you want to grab DNG files straight into a desktop or laptop computer but don't want to bother hooking up a USB cable.
I wonder what I'll discover next...
As confessed earlier, I did keep the Pixii and have been trying to shoot a lot with it to get used to it, and I have to say it's really kind of growing on me. Yes, the 0.67x finder is dinky compared to the 1.0x viewfinders I'm used to on my Epson R-D1, Bessa R3m, and Canon P, and sometimes it's a bit touchy to dial up the menu item I want using the in-finder menu display (but it's still better than any other RF camera with an in-finder menu display because there aren't any others, bwahahah...) But mostly it's enjoyable to handle, and I've been impressed with the images both in terms of overall quality and in how little post-production I have to do in Lightroom to get them to look the way I want.
Also, I admitted previously that part of my willingness to cough up the stiff price tag was that I was intrigued by the concept of a software-defined camera... and as I had hoped, I'm beginning to learn some of the tricks to doing nerdy computer stuff with it.
For example, it turns out that by making a couple of obscure menu selections, you can put the Pixii into a "system zone" mode that lets it mount on your computer with its system directories and config files visible. Obviously it would be possible to mung things up severely if you don't know what you're doing here, but it also lets you see some interesting stuff.
Among other things, it makes visible the Profiles directory where the camera's built-in color profiles live. It turns out that these are non-proprietary Adobe .dcp files [Digital Camera Profile] and you can create new ones using the Adobe DNG Profile Editor tool that's been around since 2012 (!) but still works fine. To use this tool, you copy an existing profile to use as a basis, and give it a new name; open your profile in the tool; then open a DNG image file you want to use as an example. Suppose if you like the turquoise skies and orangey skin tones seen on some ultra-popular hipster film-photography YouTube channels; you could open an image with a person and a sky. You'd then use a dropper tool to choose sample points in your photo, adjust their HSV values to your liking, and adjust curves and other useful stuff,. There's also a utility for generating a profile from a photo of a Macbeth Color Checker if you want to profile for a particular set of lighting conditions.
Once you're done, you name and export your new .dcp file -- e.g. Pixii Camera (A1571) Hipster Cinematic.dcp -- and then you can copy it into the Profiles folder in the PIXII directory. From there, once you've unmounted and restarted the camera, your new profile will be visible in the camera's Profiles menu, and you can choose it to have your photos pre-ruined – oops, I mean, pre-profiled with your unique personal visual brand – right out of the camera. (I realize you can apply .dcp profiles to any DNG file after-the-fact using various utilities, but this is a handier way to do it.)
Okay, I know, this kind of thing probably doesn't excite anybody except me, but I do remember someone else mentioning that the Pixii would be more interesting if users could define their own color profiles, so I thought I'd mention that it turns out you can.
Incidentally, in case you like the idea of Wi-fi but really hate the Pixii app, I learned that the camera has a very stripped-down HTTP server built into it, so you can just point a browser to the camera's IP address (shown in a menu) and then right-click from a list to download the DNG files you want. This is handy if you want to grab DNG files straight into a desktop or laptop computer but don't want to bother hooking up a USB cable.
I wonder what I'll discover next...
Godfrey
somewhat colored
It all sounds fun to me, just the sort of stuff that can lead to interesting results after a bit of experimentation. I'm not quite ready to buy yet, but I suspect that I'll have to get one next year ... Oh yeah, that's just a week away... LOL!
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olakiril
Well-known
This is excellent! Having it already within the DNG is great, but for me the most useful part is getting the JPEGs out of the camera with a personalized profile ready to be shared from the phone. No need for a computer.
Keep us up to date with any more interesting findings..
ranger9
Well-known
So what M-mount lenses will fit?
I discovered earlier that the Pixii has problems with large-diameter lenses, and David Barth more or less confirmed in an email that he did that intentionally (or at least decided not to worry about avoiding it) to discourage people from using lenses with maximum apertures too large for the rangefinder's effective base length (EBL.)
What I found by admittedly crude measurements is that the bottom edge of the rangefinder window is on a circle about 62mm in diameter centered on the lens mount, so lenses with this diameter or more will immediately block off part of the RF window. They also mask off most of the lens mount's release tab, making it difficult to remove the lens without the aid of a credit card, tongue depressor, popsicle stick, etc. -- so at least you have fair warning that if you have the release-tab problem, you're going to have the RF-blockage problem as well.
In practice, I'd recommend avoiding any lens with a diameter greater than about 58mm at the base. This size gives good access to the release tab, and it stays out of the rangefinder patch -- as long as the lens barrel isn't too long. But how long is too long? Today I did a little sloppy papercraft in an effort to find out.
I taped up some paper into a roll 58mm in diameter (more or less), attached it to the front of the Pixii, then kept cutting off more of its length until I found the longest it could be without intruding into the RF patch. That dimension turned out to be just over 35mm. Using some dodgy trig, I generalized as follows:
The bottom of the RF patch is 31mm above the lens centerline (from the 62mm circle above / 2.) From here, a line slopes downward at a 3.25-degree angle. This is what I'm calling the cutoff line -- if part of the lens barrel extends above it, the lens will intrude into the rangefinder patch.
To see if a lens is safe from RF intrusion, we need to know its barrel radius (diameter / 2) and subtract that from the RF patch radius (31mm.) This gives us what I call the drop distance -- the distance of the lens barrel below the rangefinder patch.
If we divide this drop distance by the tangent of our magic 3.25-degree angle, we get the length that the lens barrel can extend forward before it hits the cutoff line. If the lens barrel is shorter than that, it won't intrude in the RF patch. If it's longer (and remember most M lenses get longer as you focus closer) it will intrude. You may be able to tolerate a certain amount of intrusion, but you should at least be aware of the situation before you buy.
Now let's do a practical example. Let's say I've got my eye on Cosina's new 35mm f/2 Voigtlander Apo-Lanthar as a possible normal lens for my Pixii. The specs page tells me that the lens' diameter is 55.6mm, so rounding that up and halving it tells me the lens radius is 28mm. Now...
I discovered earlier that the Pixii has problems with large-diameter lenses, and David Barth more or less confirmed in an email that he did that intentionally (or at least decided not to worry about avoiding it) to discourage people from using lenses with maximum apertures too large for the rangefinder's effective base length (EBL.)
What I found by admittedly crude measurements is that the bottom edge of the rangefinder window is on a circle about 62mm in diameter centered on the lens mount, so lenses with this diameter or more will immediately block off part of the RF window. They also mask off most of the lens mount's release tab, making it difficult to remove the lens without the aid of a credit card, tongue depressor, popsicle stick, etc. -- so at least you have fair warning that if you have the release-tab problem, you're going to have the RF-blockage problem as well.
In practice, I'd recommend avoiding any lens with a diameter greater than about 58mm at the base. This size gives good access to the release tab, and it stays out of the rangefinder patch -- as long as the lens barrel isn't too long. But how long is too long? Today I did a little sloppy papercraft in an effort to find out.
I taped up some paper into a roll 58mm in diameter (more or less), attached it to the front of the Pixii, then kept cutting off more of its length until I found the longest it could be without intruding into the RF patch. That dimension turned out to be just over 35mm. Using some dodgy trig, I generalized as follows:
The bottom of the RF patch is 31mm above the lens centerline (from the 62mm circle above / 2.) From here, a line slopes downward at a 3.25-degree angle. This is what I'm calling the cutoff line -- if part of the lens barrel extends above it, the lens will intrude into the rangefinder patch.
To see if a lens is safe from RF intrusion, we need to know its barrel radius (diameter / 2) and subtract that from the RF patch radius (31mm.) This gives us what I call the drop distance -- the distance of the lens barrel below the rangefinder patch.
If we divide this drop distance by the tangent of our magic 3.25-degree angle, we get the length that the lens barrel can extend forward before it hits the cutoff line. If the lens barrel is shorter than that, it won't intrude in the RF patch. If it's longer (and remember most M lenses get longer as you focus closer) it will intrude. You may be able to tolerate a certain amount of intrusion, but you should at least be aware of the situation before you buy.
Now let's do a practical example. Let's say I've got my eye on Cosina's new 35mm f/2 Voigtlander Apo-Lanthar as a possible normal lens for my Pixii. The specs page tells me that the lens' diameter is 55.6mm, so rounding that up and halving it tells me the lens radius is 28mm. Now...
- 31mm (RF-patch diameter) minus 28mm (lens radius) is 3mm. That's my drop distance.
- 3mm divided by tan 3.25° gives 52.83mm. That's the longest the barrel can be before it goes above the cutoff line.
- Oops, the specs page says the lens' barrel length is 58.1mm. So it's likely this lens will peek into the RF patch at least a little bit, even at infinity.
- This lens has the same diameter as the 35, so the barrel radius is the same 28mm. That gives the same 3mm drop distance as the 35.
- That also means the max length before cutoff is the same 52.83mm
- But the specs say the barrel length of this lens is only 53mm. I don't really think my calculations were accurate to 0.01 mm (remember, I was basing all this on measuring cut-up paper!) so I just might be willing to take a chance on this one, even if the nose of the lens peeks into the RF patch a bit when focused at close distances.
cboy
Well-known
Nice they have baked in dng profiles.
Does a standard Leica magnifier eyepiece be used on the Pixii? Possiblly to increase viewfinder magnification and aid in eye relief?
I do hope one day they make a FF version. Or a Chinese manufacturer make a similar product offering. I believe the tethering in the Pixii will similarly used in the M11?
Does a standard Leica magnifier eyepiece be used on the Pixii? Possiblly to increase viewfinder magnification and aid in eye relief?
I do hope one day they make a FF version. Or a Chinese manufacturer make a similar product offering. I believe the tethering in the Pixii will similarly used in the M11?
Godfrey
somewhat colored
Interesting assessment of what fits and what doesn't. I guess, by these calculations, that some lenses might work well but won't work particularly well with their lens hood fitted ... I'm thinking of the Summarit-M 75mm f/2.4 ...and maybe even my M-Rokkor 90mm f/4 and Hektor 135mm f/4.5 with hoods fitted. I'll have to measure them and run the calculations.
It seems my more usually used lenses (CV10mm (no RF coupling, none needed!), Color-Skopar 28/2.5, Summilux 35/1.4 with relieved hood, and Summicron-M 50/2 with built-in or relieved screw-in hood) should all work fine on the Pixii.
Fun stuff. Thanks for continuing to write up your experiences with this body!
G
It seems my more usually used lenses (CV10mm (no RF coupling, none needed!), Color-Skopar 28/2.5, Summilux 35/1.4 with relieved hood, and Summicron-M 50/2 with built-in or relieved screw-in hood) should all work fine on the Pixii.
Fun stuff. Thanks for continuing to write up your experiences with this body!
G
hap
Well-known
there are vented and conical hoods for the 50mm summicron f2. I have the newly issued hood from Light Lens Lab which also fits the 35 summaron. Extremely well made and match for Leica lenses. Perhaps the vented one is most appropriate for the Pixii?
ranger9
Well-known
Unfortunately, the Pixii's eyepiece is rectangular rather than round, and seems to lack an frame or threads or any other obvious way of attaching accessories to it. I can live with that. I tried using an eyepiece magnifier for more accurate focusing of my Epson R-D1, and it did seem to help, but it was kind of a nuisance to carry around, attach, and remove, and eventually I decided it made more sense just to accept the limitations of the design.
Well, Al Moses was an awesome guy and all, but I don't feel any particular obligation to stick to the 36x24mm format he invented in 1914 for his Simplex camera! [Read Stephen's fabulous article about him here: https://cameraquest.com/simplex.htm] By the way, anyone up for joining my crusade to retire the term "full frame" (full of what?) and instead call such cameras "Moses format"?
As for the Chinese, or somebody else -- it might happen. More and more, I think the "hidden agenda" of Pixii is to show that it's possible for a very small company to make a modern digital camera on an economically sustainable basis, by avoiding proprietary components that have to be ordered in huge quantities. In the old days, a lot of cameras originated with one guy working on an idea in a machine shop: Al Moses, Oskar Barnack, Goro Yoshida of Canon, etc. In the digital era that used to seem almost impossible, because the cameras rely on application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) with names such as BIONZ, Exspeed, etc., and these ASICs require upfront investments in the tens of millions to produce.
I could make an argument that everything about the Pixii derives from the urge to avoid proprietary, large-minimum-order components. Instead of ASICs, they use a commercial ARM Cortex processor. There's no mechanical shutter because that way they don't need to buy or build a shutter module. There's no LCD because that avoids having to order a big batch of LCD panels plus display drivers plus custom ribbon cables etc. The range/viewfinder is complicated, but it's a straightforward collection of basic optical components that any precision assembler could put together on an on-demand basis.
There's no reason other small companies couldn't do the same, leading to the possibility of producing modern versions of other extinct camera types. Anybody want (for example) a digital TLR? Some company might be able to figure out a way to do it by following the Pixii business model.
There's no reason they couldn't. There's nothing tricky about the way the Pixii communicates with its companion app -- it uses an always-on connection running over low-power Bluetooth to communicate camera settings data and low-resolution preview images, then switches to Wi-Fi if the user wants to download a high-res preview or raw file. The only thing special Pixii has done is to make the process slick and seamless (unless iOS gets in the way)... other manufacturers have the same tech but make the process clunky and unintuitive (lookin' at YOU, Fujifilm!)
ranger9
Well-known
Hoods seem to be the issue for a lot of lenses that would be fine otherwise, including my Voigtlander 28/1.9 and 50/1.5 screw-mounts. At least if the hood is the problem, you can just remove it (and just enjoy the flares)!
I have a vented hood for my little 35/2 7Artisans lens, and the venting does help a bit, but something to consider: All these vented hoods were made to address viewfinder cutoff. On the Pixii, the cutoff happens in the rangefinder patch. That's a lot smaller, so even a small amount of cutoff makes a big difference. The rectangular hoods seem like a more promising solution... I'll have to look into some of those.
Of course, if I had a lens with a "problem" hood and I was absolutely determined to use it on the Pixii, taking a little notch out of the hood with an angle grinder might be a barbaric but effective solution!