Thursday, 30 June 2016
This YouTube Channel is All About DIY Repairs on Cameras and Lenses
Have a broken or malfunctioning camera or lens and want to try your hand at a DIY repair? If you’re intent on ignoring the manufacturers warnings about doing so, you should check out the YouTube channel mikeno62.
The videos are created by a handy repair guru named Kenneth who lives in Denmark.
“I like doing repair of almost everything that can be disassembled and of course assembled again,” Kenneth says. “It gives me a good feeling when I have done a complicated repair, it’s just like a really good puzzle.”
To give you a taste of what videos in his channel are like, here are some of the most viewed ones so far…
Fixing a stuck zoom ring in a Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens:
Fixing a broken shutter in a Canon 1D Mark II:
Cleaning the aperture blades in a Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/1.4:
Fixing the looseness and focusing issues of a Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8:
Cleaning dust from the lens elements of a Nikon 85mm f/1.4:
Fixing a stiff focus ring on a Canon 50mm f/1.4:
If you have a broken piece of gear that’s out of warranty and collecting dust on your shelf, and feel daring and would like to attempt some surgery yourself, give this YouTube channel a search to see if he has covered your camera or lens before. You might just get enough courage and insight to attempt the fix.
It goes without saying that repairing complicated equipment yourself is risky business — do it wrong and you could mess things up really badly, so proceed at your own peril.
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Eyefi To Brick Its Older Wi-Fi Cards, And Photographers Aren’t Happy
If you’re a photographer shooting with Eyefi’s older generation Wi-Fi memory cards, here’s something you should know: your card will soon become more or less useless.
Just days after announcing that it had sold its cloud services to Ricoh, Eyefi sent out an email to customers this week, informing them that older X1 and X2 cards — everything prior to the new Mobi line — now have an “End of Life” date of September 16th, 2016.
This news may be particularly frustrating for photographers who purchased an Eyefi memory card not too long ago.
“Eye-Fi began phasing out sales of the X2 product line in 2012,” Eyefi explains in an FAQ on its site. “The last version produced by the company were sold through authorized channels in the United States in March, 2015.”
So if you purchased an X2 card more recently than March 2015, you probably got it through an unauthorized seller.
After September 16th, you will no longer be able to create an Eyefi Center account, which was required by X1 and X2 cards.
Certain functions of your X2 card, such as Direct Mode, may continue to function beyond the End of Life date, but you’ll need to set it up prior to that date. Selective Transfer will also function if enabled early, but Relayed Transfer will cease to function.
The Eyefi software used by older cards will also no longer be updated or supported, so there’s absolutely no guarantee that critical features will continue to work into the future.
It’s rather unusual for products such as Wi-Fi cards to be bricked completely by the manufacturer, and some photographers are understandably upset about the news. One frustrated customer published an open letter to Eyefi on Hacker News.
“Receiving your email about removing support for X2 cards this morning has made me furious,” the author writes. “That your company would have the gall to sell cards that would be obsolete within a few years is preposterous.”
“I would have updated to the Mobi cards in time anyway, but out of principle I will avoid Eye-Fi products in the future and advise my photographing friends to do the same. Shame on your company.”
Eyefi says the reason for the End of Life is that older wireless and encryption technologies are no longer safe and appropriate, so they’re dropping support and forcing photographers to move to its newer products with newer technologies.
For photographers wishing to switch to newer Eyefi Mobi cards, Eyefi is offering a 20% discount for up to 3 units. However, we’re guessing that many customers will now be thinking twice before jumping into the new Eyefi generation.
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A Look at How Snapchat’s Powerful Facial Recognition Tech Works
Snapchat’s “lenses,” more colloquially known as selfie filters or just “filters,” may seem like a totally inane feature. But it turns out the facial recognition technology behind them is advanced, impressive… and a tad scary.
Snapchat’s filters are the brainchild of a Ukranian startup called Looksery, which Snapchat acquired for a record-setting $150M (well… record-setting in Ukraine). Unfortunately, Snapchat won’t let anybody talk to those engineers directly, but Vox recently went digging through their patents to figure out how the tech works. They reveal what they found and how these ‘silly’ filters work in the short educational video above.
At the most basic level, the app uses computer vision to spot you based on contrast patterns typically seen in and around a human face; however, that’s not specific enough to identify, for example, the border of your lips or where to put that dog nose.
To get to that level of specificity, Snapchat trained the system using hundreds (quite possibly thousands) of faces that were manually marked with points to show where the borders of lips, eyes, nose, and face are. The trained application can then take that point-mask and shift it to match your individual face based on the data its getting from your camera at 24 frames per second.
The final step is to create a mesh from that point-mask; a mesh that can move with you or trigger an animation when you open your mouth or raise your eyebrows.
Of course, all of this facial recognition has a slightly scary Minority Report-like component, which is mentioned at the very end of the video. But whether you’re terrified of facial recognition or excited by the potential for tech like this to improve things like portrait autofocus or automatic selection/masking, it’s fascinating to get a peek at what and how exactly your smartphone’s camera “sees” you.
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The 87th Nikon F Ever Produced is Up on eBay, Features Rare Cloth Shutter
If you’re a camera collector you better go collect your bib, because this one will make you salivate profusely. An eBay user selling off their late grandfather’s camera collection on eBay has just posted a very special camera: the 87th Nikon F to come off the production line back in 1959.
A Nikon Rumors reader spotted it, and if the camera is authentic (and it seems to be) this is an incredible find. The kind of eBay find you just don’t see without a six-figure price tag attached.
At first, it seems seller djbhobbys had no idea what this camera was worth, they were simply listing cameras from their grandfather’s collection. This one was in a bin labeled “TOP CAMERAS”… now they know why. Interested buyers with a good eye asked djbhobbys for more pictures and, once they saw them, revealed just how special this camera is.
Not only is it the 87th Nikon 7 off the production line (according to the serial number) it also features a super rare cloth shutter. According to Nikon Rumors, it’s possible only about 100 of these cloth shutter Nikon F’s were ever produced!
There are three days and eleven hours left in the auction as of this writing, and already the price is up to $2,204. We have no idea how much this collector’s item will go for in the end, but to give you an idea of potential worth, NR says the last time they saw a Nikon F this early up for sale, it was being listed for $250,000 by Gray’s of Westminster.
That camera ended up being a forgery… if this one is real, it is a very very special and valuable camera. Check out the listing for yourself or jump in on the bidding madness here.
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