Dashmellow
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- Dash Cam
- Umpteen
For quite some time I'd been noticing an interesting M12 zoom lens on Banggood selling at a very attractive price and finally went ahead and ordered one. This is a fast ƒ1.4 - 2.8mm to 12mm Varifocal manual zoom designed for CCTV cameras that will accommodate a 1/3 inch sensor and captures an angle of view ranging from 25º to 110º. This lens is specifically designed for IR work and therefore does not have an integrated IR-cut filter. The lens has proven itself to be of remarkably high quality for the money, both in its physical construction and especially optically.
My original plan was to immediately install an IR-cut filter and use the lens to capture normal true color video but after installing the lens on a Mobius (1) camera I decided to play around with some Infra-Red videography. The results ended up kind of blowing my mind and have totally altered my dash cam experience going forward. What started out as some fun, temporary hobby experimentation is quickly becoming an essential camera in my vehicle and elsewhere.
The main thing to keep in mind is that the results I present here could ONLY have been achieved with the Mobius action camera and no other. I will explain further and elaborate on this later in this thread but essentially I have been able to use the unique color balance and exposure adjustment capabilities of the Mobius to achieve the imagery you will see here. Once again, the Mobius has proved itself to be the most versatile, practical, interesting and fun video camera I've ever owned and it is the reason I love the Mobius platform so much.
When I first got this lens I was worried that it would be fragile when mounted on a Mobius and require handling with kid gloves. Instead it has proved to be extraordinarily solid and the whole package has a certain heft and integrity as if it was designed like this to begin with. One thing I did do was swap the original threaded base module with a slightly beefier one that I installed onto the original sensor plate. I did that because I used an older Mobius lens module for this project that had some slightly damaged lens threads and opted to repair it rather that use the existing "A" module in the camera that I decided not to mess with. I'll talk more about that and post a photo later on in this thread.
Due to the abysmal bandwidth I'm stuck with out here in the middle of nowhere I'm going to start by telling this story with still frames. Eventually, I will post some short videos but where I live a 5 minute clip can take as much as an hour and a half to upload over my 3 Mb/768 Kbps DSL connection. There's a lot to show and talk about here. I'll do it over the course of several posts as time permits.
These landscapes are among my first color and exposure tweaking experiments with this lens. Captured a bee in flight!
This is the same scene as above shot a few minutes later with a normal Mobius A lens camera.
The important thing to understand here is that all digital camera sensors are inherently sensitive to the near infra-red spectrum and slightly above. For this reason all digital cameras such as dash cams are fitted with IR-cut filters to filter out IR light between about 740nm and 1000nm.
In "normal" true color digital photography Blue is from 400 - 500 nm (nanometers), green is from 500 - 600 nm and red is from 600-700 nm. IR starts at 700 nm and for photography extends to about 1,000 nm. 1,000 nm is called a micron. Longer wavelength IR used in systems to see heat levels as in thermal imaging cameras like the Flir are between 1 - 10 microns or 1,000 to 10,000 nm. For our purposes we are concerned with "near infra-red" of approximately 700 nm to 1000 nm or thereabouts.
If you do not have an IR-cut filter on a digital camera lens you will end up with a purplish or magenta image. Typical results look like this image:
Without an IR-cut filter on this particular 2.8mm to 12mm Varifocal zoom and the Mobius camera set to its default settings the images look like this:
By using the exposure and color balance settings in Mobius mSetup I was able to manually tweak the default IR results you see just above here completely without the use of any specialized filters into a more true color image that, while still IR "false color" it is now much closer to reality to the point where it becomes a viable dash camera that captures the true color of cars and other objects. At the same time it is still very much an IR image which offers unique capabilities that can reveal details not captured by traditional dash cams while often producing stunning looking "otherworldly" imagery.
My original plan was to immediately install an IR-cut filter and use the lens to capture normal true color video but after installing the lens on a Mobius (1) camera I decided to play around with some Infra-Red videography. The results ended up kind of blowing my mind and have totally altered my dash cam experience going forward. What started out as some fun, temporary hobby experimentation is quickly becoming an essential camera in my vehicle and elsewhere.
The main thing to keep in mind is that the results I present here could ONLY have been achieved with the Mobius action camera and no other. I will explain further and elaborate on this later in this thread but essentially I have been able to use the unique color balance and exposure adjustment capabilities of the Mobius to achieve the imagery you will see here. Once again, the Mobius has proved itself to be the most versatile, practical, interesting and fun video camera I've ever owned and it is the reason I love the Mobius platform so much.
When I first got this lens I was worried that it would be fragile when mounted on a Mobius and require handling with kid gloves. Instead it has proved to be extraordinarily solid and the whole package has a certain heft and integrity as if it was designed like this to begin with. One thing I did do was swap the original threaded base module with a slightly beefier one that I installed onto the original sensor plate. I did that because I used an older Mobius lens module for this project that had some slightly damaged lens threads and opted to repair it rather that use the existing "A" module in the camera that I decided not to mess with. I'll talk more about that and post a photo later on in this thread.
Due to the abysmal bandwidth I'm stuck with out here in the middle of nowhere I'm going to start by telling this story with still frames. Eventually, I will post some short videos but where I live a 5 minute clip can take as much as an hour and a half to upload over my 3 Mb/768 Kbps DSL connection. There's a lot to show and talk about here. I'll do it over the course of several posts as time permits.
These landscapes are among my first color and exposure tweaking experiments with this lens. Captured a bee in flight!
This is the same scene as above shot a few minutes later with a normal Mobius A lens camera.
The important thing to understand here is that all digital camera sensors are inherently sensitive to the near infra-red spectrum and slightly above. For this reason all digital cameras such as dash cams are fitted with IR-cut filters to filter out IR light between about 740nm and 1000nm.
In "normal" true color digital photography Blue is from 400 - 500 nm (nanometers), green is from 500 - 600 nm and red is from 600-700 nm. IR starts at 700 nm and for photography extends to about 1,000 nm. 1,000 nm is called a micron. Longer wavelength IR used in systems to see heat levels as in thermal imaging cameras like the Flir are between 1 - 10 microns or 1,000 to 10,000 nm. For our purposes we are concerned with "near infra-red" of approximately 700 nm to 1000 nm or thereabouts.
If you do not have an IR-cut filter on a digital camera lens you will end up with a purplish or magenta image. Typical results look like this image:
Without an IR-cut filter on this particular 2.8mm to 12mm Varifocal zoom and the Mobius camera set to its default settings the images look like this:
By using the exposure and color balance settings in Mobius mSetup I was able to manually tweak the default IR results you see just above here completely without the use of any specialized filters into a more true color image that, while still IR "false color" it is now much closer to reality to the point where it becomes a viable dash camera that captures the true color of cars and other objects. At the same time it is still very much an IR image which offers unique capabilities that can reveal details not captured by traditional dash cams while often producing stunning looking "otherworldly" imagery.
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