Mobius Varifocal Zoom IR

[Dashmellow]

It is very illegal to use a hand held device while driving where I live and the fines were recently raised dramatically but many, many people just do it anyway. The worst seem to be teenage girls who literally seem to forget that they are driving a car.

Here are a few Mobius varifocal captures from two days ago of a teenage girl just as she appears to be receiving a call on her phone. Traffic is moving along slowly but moving. She places the phone down on her center console and spends a long time staring at it, never even once looking up at the road while proceeding to fix her hair with both hands. Her car is moving forward during this time. At some point she transfers the phone to her lap so she can text, still never looking up. Unbelievable, hands off the steering wheel and a not even looking at the road! At one point, she is so oblivious to her surroundings and lost in whatever she was doing on her phone that she came to a full stop in moving traffic. (third image below) As I got closer I had to hit my horn to remind her that she was supposed to be driving her car in moving traffic and not stopped and lost in texting on her phone. Just a month ago, in this thread I described a very similar story about a teenage girl doing essentially the same thing and now here it is again on camera. Amazing!

 

[jokiin]

It is very illegal to use a hand held device while driving where I live and the fines were recently raised dramatically but many, many people just do it anyway.

same here, on holiday weekends you can lose your license in one go from using a phone, there are dummies that still feel the law doesn't apply to them though, have even seen idiots driving along watching live streamed sporting events

 

[Dashmellow]

same here, on holiday weekends you can lose your license in one go from using a phone, there are dummies that still feel the law doesn't apply to them though, have even seen idiots driving along watching live streamed sporting events

The smart phone insanity I see everywhere these days drives me crazy. I should start a thread about it with this footage. This business of taking both hands off the steering wheel while not even looking at the road when the vehicle is moving boggles my mind. When I saw a teenage girl do it a few years ago I thought it was a one-off, so to see it again just astonishes me. I'm almost tempted to burn the footage and stills onto DVD and take it down to the local Police headquarters.

 

[jokiin]

The smart phone insanity I see everywhere these days drives me crazy. I should start a thread about it with this footage. This business of taking both hands off the steering wheel while not even looking at the road when the vehicle is moving boggles my mind. When I saw a teenage girl do it a few years ago I thought it was a one-off, so to see it again just astonishes me. I'm almost tempted to burn the footage and stills onto DVD and take it down to the local Police headquarters.

someone here caught video one morning of someone driving down a motorway eating a bowl of cereal, no hands on the wheel, not a Tesla either so no self driving ability

 

[TonyM]

@Dashmellow (or anyone else) - Is there a trick to using the Visbella refill? I've used up the 4g. I'm having trouble getting the refill into the squeezy pen.

 

[Harsh]

@Dashmellow (or anyone else) - Is there a trick to using the Visbella refill? I've used up the 4g. I'm having trouble getting the refill into the squeezy pen.

Squeeze the bottom half of the pen and pour a bit of the glue and release. Repeat 4-5 times to fill it up.

 

[TonyM]

I'm going to have a go at using an M1 with a 2.8-14mm lens to record the inside of my wife's glass kiln. The camera will look through a small peep hole. The temperature inside is about 700degC, but the camera will be in ambient temperatures around 10degC.

Should I expect any focus shift due to the high temperature, or infra red glow of the glass?

 

[Dashmellow]

Should I expect any focus shift due to the high temperature, or infra red glow of the glass?

No idea! Let us know what happens. Interesting project.

 

[SawMaster]

I'm going to have a go at using an M1 with a 2.8-14mm lens to record the inside of my wife's glass kiln. The camera will look through a small peep hole. The temperature inside is about 700degC, but the camera will be in ambient temperatures around 10degC.

Should I expect any focus shift due to the high temperature, or infra red glow of the glass?

I'd expect some IR heat transfer, but where that effect showed up at could be anywhere from the sensor outward. It could affect the optical elements themselves if such energy comes to a focus within the lens assembly, as such an individual point may not have the necessary heat tolerance. It will certainly be interesting to see your results!

Phil

 

[kamkar]

Just now turning into the tunnel thru the building to park in the back yard, i had to wait for a on coming car before i made my left turn, the guy was on the phone and i counted at least 4 kids in the car, none of then wearing a seatbelt as far as i could see.

 

[TonyM]

I've been thinking about the project a bit more. My wife wants to check the progress of glass that slumps into a mould. Colour accuracy is not an issue - even B&W would be fine.

There's no ambient light or illumination inside the kiln. The only 'light' comes from the glass being heated to 700-800degC, so it's infra-red and some visible red. I wonder if removing the IR filter would be beneficial?

 

[SawMaster]

I've been thinking about the project a bit more. My wife wants to check the progress of glass that slumps into a mould. Colour accuracy is not an issue - even B&W would be fine.

There's no ambient light or illumination inside the kiln. The only 'light' comes from the glass being heated to 700-800degC, so it's infra-red and some visible red. I wonder if removing the IR filter would be beneficial?

Not hard to figure out. Try it as-is and if you don't like the results then next batch try it the other way. This presuming she will be visibly monitoring too until the experiment proves reliable If any cam can do it, this will be the one- Mobius is still unique and more flexibile that any other cam.

Phil

 

[TonyM]

I don't really want to keep removing and replacing IR filters - I don't have any spare right now. However I do have a spare varifocal so I'll remove its IR filter and compare using two cameras.

I'll probably end up using the 6-22mm, so I'll stop posting off-topic in this thread. If I get any interesting results, I'll post in a new 6-22 thread.

 

[Dashmellow]

I've been thinking about the project a bit more. My wife wants to check the progress of glass that slumps into a mould. Colour accuracy is not an issue - even B&W would be fine.

There's no ambient light or illumination inside the kiln. The only 'light' comes from the glass being heated to 700-800degC, so it's infra-red and some visible red. I wonder if removing the IR filter would be beneficial?

I would start without removing the IR filter and see what happens. You might want it there. Depending on the heat you expose the lens to you may also need to invest in a small sheet of protective heat absorbing glass to mount in front of the lens.

https://www.edmundoptics.com/f/schott-kg-heat-absorbing-glass/12285/

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=heat absorbing glass

 

[TonyM]

@Dashmellow back in the days before you installed an IR-cut filter on this lens, I remember that you created a custom WB profile for your M1. Did that profile only work in ambient light? Was it any good at night under artificial light?

I have just installed a varifocal lens without a filter on a Maxi. The new Maxi FW allows a custom WB, so I had a go at adjusting the WB and it seemed OK in my testing at home. Unfortunately it was getting dark so by the time I started testing in the car I needed to use headlights, at which point the Auto WB looks much better then the custom WB.

I suppose I could use two camera profiles - one for daytime and the other one for night time.

 

[Dashmellow]

@Dashmellow back in the days before you installed an IR-cut filter on this lens, I remember that you created a custom WB profile for your M1. Did that profile only work in ambient light? Was it any good at night under artificial light?

I have just installed a varifocal lens without a filter on a Maxi. The new Maxi FW allows a custom WB, so I had a go at adjusting the WB and it seemed OK in my testing at home. Unfortunately it was getting dark so by the time I started testing in the car I needed to use headlights, at which point the Auto WB looks much better then the custom WB.

I suppose I could use two camera profiles - one for daytime and the other one for night time.

I never bothered with trying to change white balance for night shooting. As long as I could get a decent image capture with the daylight settings I was OK with the results and as you know the Mobius is not a stellar low light performer anyway. Interestingly with this lens it seemed to improve night time performance and for the most part color balance didn't seem to make too much of a difference.

You may recall this image from early in this thread which seems to be one of the only IR night images I still have from back then. All in all the colors are fairly accurate with the RGB settings I used even though there is no IR cut filter installed. Red is red, green is green. white is white, etc.

I've still not explored the new white balance features on the Maxi as much as I'd like. This is a very busy time of year for me and I haven't had much time to fiddle with cameras lately. I did obtain a super-cap for my Maxi so I hope to get around to it soon and I'm thinking of putting this zoom lens on it.

The best thing to do is try different settings on your Maxi and see what happens. I'd be curious to see how the sensor handles IR compared to the M1.

 

[TonyM]

I have this 2.8-14mm lens and the 6-22mm available, both without an IR-cut filter following my tests on recording inside a kiln. It's the 6-22mm that I have installed at the moment. I've ordered a pair of replacement filters, but in advance of their arrival I decided to try the lenses without them.

The Maxi does not have a webcam output so I have done the focusing with the WiFi app. One downside I encountered is that the app lacks the ability to modify the custom WB, so I still need mSetup for that. EDIT: The Maxi does have a webcam output. It's just that I cannot activate it!

Being able to set up different custom WB settings for video modes 1 and 2 on the Maxi has proved to be useful for tweaking the parameters. I'll post some examples later.

 

[Dashmellow]

The Maxi does not have a webcam output so I have done the focusing with the WiFi app.

The Maxi does indeed have a web cam mode. Works well on both Mac and Windows (see the Maxi user's guide for Windows instructions).

Even better is that unlike the Mobius 1 which offers web cam mode at 720p, the Maxi provides 1920 x 1440 resolution.

 

[TonyM]

The Maxi does indeed have a web cam mode. Works well on both Mac and Windows (see the Maxi user's guide for Windows instructions).

Even better is that unlike the Mobius 1 which offers web cam mode at 720p, the Maxi provides 1920 x 1440 resolution.

I stand corrected - the Maxi does have a webcam mode. However I don't remember ever making it work. I've tried various settings in Windows 10 but I can't seem to find a solution.

I'll go back to the Maxi thread and look for some help there.

 

[Dashmellow]

I stand corrected - the Maxi does have a webcam mode. However I don't remember ever making it work. I've tried various settings in Windows 10 but I can't seem to find a solution.

I'll go back to the Maxi thread and look for some help there.

I find it fairly easy to connect on the Mac, even easier sometimes than connecting the M1. Sometimes I forget to remove the memory card first but otherwise it works well since you don't need special drivers like on Windows.

Have you tried the methods from the user manual? Do the iCatch drivers get installed correctly? You may need to press the shutter button briefly to connect.

The one issue I run into is that during web cam mode (and at other times) sometimes the Maxi locks up on me still powered up but it can't be turned off until I do a hard reset with a paper clip. In fact, this business of the camera freezing occasionally is another one of those things that seems to have been left unresolved by Mobius. One would have thought that would have been fixed by now but at this point I'm left wondering if the camera will ever get another firmware update.