Mobius 5MP Varifocal Zoom 6-22mm ƒ/1.6

I whole heartedly agree, just wasn't sure whether the intentions were to have Wide + Zoom, or Wide + Telephoto Prime (equivalent to the focal length you've been experimenting with).
I think that for general appeal, the second lens should be a telephoto prime that is not so large that it draws too much attention to itself, and the focus can be pre-set at the factory. Not everyone wants to tinker with set screws and lens focusing.

Ideally the camera housing would allow the owner to replace the lens with another of their choice, which could be a varifocal such as the one we have been experimenting with here.
 
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I whole heartedly agree, just wasn't sure whether the intentions were to have Wide + Zoom, or Wide + Telephoto Prime (equivalent to the focal length you've been experimenting with).

I absolutely love having a varifocal lens on the Mobius. The easy ability to change FOV and adjust focus without having to dismantle the camera is a game changer that facilitates changing parameters in the field even with a small low resolution monitor. I love how I can go from shooting macro videos of ants one minute and then have the camera back in my vehicle as a telephoto dash cam a few minutes later with minimal fuss.

As for a viable commercial dual FOV front lens dash cam, I just don't see anything other than a fixed focal length telephoto lens being an option. For the average dash cam buyer, fiddling with changing focal lengths and achieving proper focus on the fly is probably a bridge too far.
 
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Will probably start playing with my new MAXI soon :)
It's running pretty stable, I can change parameters at the computer, just have to wire up an adapter for a video monitor.
Have my adapters at the ready :)
 
Will probably start playing with my new MAXI soon :)
It's running pretty stable, I can change parameters at the computer, just have to wire up an adapter for a video monitor.
Have my adapters at the ready :)

Just in case you're not already aware of this, you don't need to wire up any adapters. Just purchase the Mobius AV wiring harness from Eletoponline365 and you'll have RCA audio and video out connectivity. (plus 5V external power connectivity)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/181166013424

av.jpg
 
I'll order a set of those.
Waited for the camera, might as well wait for the adapters :)
Gonna play some more but the case shrouding the lens limits back focus with my adapter.
Need to make sure everything is working properly before I trim the shroud.
So far it seems to lock up in web cam mode if I do anything wrong.
But it does work.
I assume this connector kit will work with the MAXI?
 

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I'll order a set of those.
Waited for the camera, might as well wait for the adapters :)
Gonna play some more but the case shrouding the lens limits back focus with my adapter.
Need to make sure everything is working properly before I trim the shroud.
So far it seems to lock up in web cam mode if I do anything wrong.
But it does work.
I assume this connector kit will work with the MAXI?

The unique thing about the Mobius is that you can buy spare parts, ranging from new PCBs, to lens modules. As with the Mobius 1 and the M2 I expect we will be soon be able to purchase spare camera housings for the Maxi for only a few dollars. This way you can modify the camera all you like, multiple times and still have the original camera intact if you want it.

mobius_case.jpg

You can also easily remove the entire circuitboard, lens module and battery from the case and use it mounted anywhere you like, such as in a custom built housing.
 
I'll order a set of those.
Waited for the camera, might as well wait for the adapters :)
Gonna play some more but the case shrouding the lens limits back focus with my adapter.
Need to make sure everything is working properly before I trim the shroud.
So far it seems to lock up in web cam mode if I do anything wrong.
But it does work.
I assume this connector kit will work with the MAXI?

When I've looked into the possibility of using DSLR lenses on the Mobius the challenge seems to be matching the flange focal distance (which is apparently unique to each lens manufacturer) to an M12 lens module. (Wikipedia seems to have a pretty comprehensive list of specs.) Since M12 lenses generally don't have a flange, except for these varifocals which sort of do but not quite the way bayonet or threaded mount 35mm camera lenses do it's obviously not quite so easy as just screwing in the lens to the module. I've seen several types of adapters for say Canon or Nikon mount to C mount and then C mount to M12 mount that "might" work better than the one in your photo. I guess there are shims available too. Some of the adapters I've seen are either deeper or more shallow.

You might want to start your own thread on the subject since this thread is basically dedicated to the 6-22mm varifocal ƒ/1.6 used so far on the original M1 rather than about fitting DSLR lenses on the new Maxi. :)
 
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No big deal. It's pretty common around here for threads to venture off topic but it was beginning to feel like this one was about to go completely off the rails into some other territory. Personally, I'm fascinated by the idea of mounting DSLR lenses on the Mobius and have been thinking about trying it for quite some time so I'd love to see a dedicated thread on the subject.
 
I'm fascinated by the idea of mounting DSLR lenses on the Mobius

hmm I will spare my Tamron 18-400mm lens for that project. $$$

I would like to get a maxi, if there can get some wifi enable and a zoom lens as described in this thread.

What you have posted look very interesting.

I might take contact to you later for some information, I'm going on a viking rage first, will bring a dashcam and a dlsr to get some documentation.
 
@Viking, please feel free to contact me any time. I'll do my best to answer your questions.

Having said this, I've been receiving private communications from several DCT members who want advice on purchasing, mounting and configuring varifocal lenses on their Mobius cameras. In each case, these are members who have not posted to either of the two existing Mobius varifocal threads. I would encourage anyone who has an interest in these lenses to post their questions here in this thread (or the other thread) where we can all participate in the discussion and any answers provided can be available to all.
 
No big deal. It's pretty common around here for threads to venture off topic but it was beginning to feel like this one was about to go completely off the rails into some other territory. Personally, I'm fascinated by the idea of mounting DSLR lenses on the Mobius and have been thinking about trying it for quite some time so I'd love to see a dedicated thread on the subject.

Not wanting to venture off topic, so anyone wanting to reply, please start topic another away from Dashmallows, but Dashmallow, take a look at the Backbone Website I've pointed people to before in relation to examples of high quality M12 lenses. They also do Action cams fitted with C mounts to allow the fitment of DSLR lenses using a step down adaptor. The fact it can be done for Action Cams suggests it's doable for Dashcams as well, although given the likely demand, I would imagine it could be a DIY or niche manufacturer product:

https://www.back-bone.ca/product/h6pro/
 
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@Viking, please feel free to contact me any time. I'll do my best to answer your questions.

Having said this, I've been receiving private communications from several DCT members who want advice on purchasing, mounting and configuring varifocal lenses on their Mobius cameras. In each case, these are members who have not posted to either of the two existing Mobius varifocal threads. I would encourage anyone who has an interest in these lenses to post their questions here in this thread (or the other thread) where we can all participate in the discussion and any answers provided can be available to all.

might be better in the long run to write up a bit of an FAQ on these that you can just point people to (or ideally they find) rather than having to answer the same sorts of questions over and over, I get the same type of no post members sending messages asking for help with stuff and I like to point them back out to the public forum to keep the discussion active which also generates content that helps others, collectively most of the info you've probably provided already but for this particular topic if it was collated into a single post and stickied might be worthwhile, this seems to have a lot more interest than some of the other DIY projects that come up
 
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might be better in the long run to write up a bit of an FAQ on these that you can just point people to (or ideally they find) rather than having to answer the same sorts of questions over and over, I get the same type of no post members sending messages asking for help with stuff and I like to point them back out to the public forum to keep the discussion active which also generates content that helps others, collectively most of the info you've probably provided already but for this particular topic if it was collated into a single post and stickied might be worthwhile, this seems to have a lot more interest than some of the other DIY projects that come up

Thanks, that's not a bad idea. All in all, probably most of what people want to know is already in these two varifocal threads with additional info likely coming soon. A sticky might not be a bad idea though. Maybe @TonyM and I can collaborate on one and post something if there are enough members who express an interest in buying one of these lenses.

I've occasionally wasted quite a lot of time answering questions or providing requested advice in PMs to non-posting members who have contacted me and sometimes once they get the information they want they just disappear without so much as a thank you. Really pisses me off! Sometimes people are very nice and voice their appreciation. I've gotten to a point however where I rarely get into those kind of private discussions with members I don't know. I just recommend that they post to the forums where I assure them I will respond to their queries there. The varifocal lens thing is a little more unique and since I've somehow become a bit of a go-between with Treeye I've been more accommodating as some of these contacts were from people wanting to know which IR-cut filter mounting method they would or would not receive if they placed an order. One person to contact me is a fairly well known DCT member who posts elsewhere but has so far not posted in this thread but who has always seemed like a friendly affable fellow so I was happy to enter into a correspondence with him, more-so than when I receive requests from members who have never posted to the forum even once.
 
this seems to have a lot more interest than some of the other DIY projects that come up

No kidding! This lens is transformational! It basically transforms the five year old Mobus into a high performance telephoto dash cam/action cam for 14 bucks! My experience of it is that it's like I went out and bought a whole new camera. Amazing!
 
Shows the power of higher quality glass. It's easy for many people to forget in these days of the emphasis being on the sensor, that the lens is the source and no matter how good the sensor you put behind it, it can only capture the picture resolution, contrast, sharpness and detail that's presented to it by the lens. The sensor takes a capture of the scene as projected onto it from the back of the lens, not the picture of the world outside. One of the best photos I ever took was a family portrait took on a tripod and using a self timer (!) and it was taken using a £25 2nd hand Practica camera similar to this: https://picclick.co.uk/Praktica-LTL3-35mm-SLR-Camera-Body-Free-UK-112944835930.html .

People asked me for ages what Canon or Nikon DSLR I'd used and wouldn't believe me when I told them it was an old Practica who's only feature was a manual meter with a needle that moved! The secret to the picture quality was the fast prime 28mm West German Zeiss Lens that somebody unwisely sold with it. I later had a mid range Canon DSLR, a model that had won awards in magazines, with a quality consumer lens, and it couldn't even come close to matching the Practica / Zeiss combination.
 
I have received this lens today, I haven't fitted it to the Mobius yet but I have connected the ribbon cable and set it up in webcam mode on my laptop. Could someone please point me to a tutorial on how to focus this lens.
 
I was curious to see how well this f1.6 6-22mm varifocal lens works at night.

When stationary and at low speed, the Mobius 1 with the 6-22mm lens delivers crisp, detailed images even in very low light. When driving faster, car movement tends to blur the long-distance view, but it's still capturing details beyond the reach of the A119.



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I have received this lens today, I haven't fitted it to the Mobius yet but I have connected the ribbon cable and set it up in webcam mode on my laptop. Could someone please point me to a tutorial on how to focus this lens.

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Each unique lens has its own “built in” amount of depth of field. This is especially true of the fixed focus primary lenses which we are all familiar with from our dash cams. Fixed aperture varifocal lenses such as the one featured in this thread are different in that the depth of field varies as you zoom the focal length. (I'll talk more about this later.)

Hyperfocal distance is a function of the lens' depth of field but is dependent upon WHERE you've focused the lens.

Hyperfocal distance can sometimes be a complicated and confusing subject but at its simplest, hyperfocal distance is the focusing distance that gives your images the greatest depth of field. For example, consider a landscape where you want everything — foreground and background — to appear sharp. If you focus on the foreground, the background will appear blurry in the image. And if you focus on the background, the foreground will look out of focus. The solution is to focus at a particular point between the foreground and the background, which makes both the foreground and the background elements of the scene appear reasonably sharp. This focusing point is called the hyperfocal distance. If you focus at the hyperfocal distance, your photo will be sharp from half that point out to infinity. So, if your hyperfocal distance for a given aperture and focal length is ten feet, everything from five feet all the way until the horizon should appear sharp. (although sharpness will drop off at greater distances outside the available depth of field with these types of lenses, especially at the longer focal lengths.)

As the illustration I've created attempts to demonstrate, the basic idea here is to determine (approximately) how much depth of field you've got to work with (the green box) and then move the hyperfocal distance forward and backward until you get the results you are after. So, you are essentially moving the green box forward towards the horizon (infinity) or closer to the camera (foreground). For normal everyday photography or video one might just focus on the particular object one is interested in and not worry so much about things nearer or farther away being out of focus. For dash cam work however, the depth of field available to us with each lens is vital, so adjusting for the optimal hyperfocal distance when focusing these varifocal lenses becomes more critical.

From my experience with both the 2.8-12mm ƒ/1.4 varifocal and this 6-22mm ƒ/1.6 varifocal, when using these lenses for dash camera work, finding the optimal point of focus can be a bit of a challenge and can require some trial and error. There have been times when I thought I had the lens perfectly focused only to later discover after a day's shooting that cars either near or far were not quite as in focus as I wanted them or expected them to be. This is partly the result of lots of experimentation with these lenses that require constant refocusing. Once you find a permanent focal length setting that you are happy with for dash cam purposes, you can basically set it and forget it.

One reason finding optimal focus can be a challenge is that every time you change the focal length of the lens, even slightly (zooming) you are changing the amount of depth of field available to you. The depth of field you thought you had last time might not be the depth of field you've got now. This is partly because these varifocal lenses have a fixed aperture. As you zoom the lens this fixed aperture becomes a “relative aperture” according to the amount of zoom applied because you've got the same sized hole (the aperture) in relation to either the wide angle or telephoto capability of the lens. So, the fixed ƒ/1.6 aperture when the lens is set to “6mm” will be different (relatively smaller) when the lens is zoomed out to 22mm. Also, as you zoom in, your hyperfocal distance moves farther and farther away and you need to compensate for this too.

Many high end DSLR and professional cinema zoom lenses have automatic irises that adjust the lens opening (aperture) according to the amount of zoom applied and the amount of exposure required. These CCTV M12 zoom lenses on the other hand are entirely manual and have fixed apertures that stay the same regardless of how you adjust the focal range, thus the depth of field will change as you zoom in and out and the exposure settings may even need to be adjusted.

Sometimes there is a grey area between the theory of hyperfocal distance and the actual practice out in the field, especially when attempting to use these CCTV lenses designed for static surveillance conditions in the challenging and dynamic environments that dash cams operate in. So, the bottom line here is to have a basic grasp of the concepts outlined here and then experiment with focusing until you find out what works best for your particular installation and driving conditions. You may find that you really want the sharpest imagery of cars way out ahead of you or you may want to optimize for cars directly in front of you in traffic. Maybe you want to try for the best compromise? (This 6-22mm lens happens to have excellent depth of field characteristics which is one of its more appealing features for dash cam use because it can actually work relatively well capturing good detail in the foreground AND as a sharply focused telephoto.)

Once you become more familiar with exactly how this lens performs you can find and select the sweet spot that works best for you. A bit of trial and error here will be your friend.
 
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(This 6-22mm lens happens to have excellent depth of field characteristics which is one of its more appealing features for dash cam use because it can actually work relatively well capturing good detail in the foreground AND as a sharply focused telephoto.)
I agree that it is much easier to achieve acceptable focus with this lens than most of my fixed length lenses.

I think I have found a zoom and focus setting that I am happy with for dashcam use. Close up objects are sharp, whilst ones in the distance are acceptable from my point of view.

I will probably mark those positions on the lens before I make any changes.
 
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