Depth of Field Adapter on Steroids

Tons o Glass 0 Class wrote:

Faboky certainly sounds cheap - $20 worth of parts... And it sounds like you've made a lot of progress already which is awesome; here I am dragging my feet and hemming and hawing over lens choices hehe.

Here it is:

Faboky 20220830, including Canon PowerShot ELPH 180

The odd reflection in the lens is the side wall of my light box, in which it barely fits.

As shown, it is set to focus at about 8'; it's shorter at infinity focus. Weight as shown is just 808g, a little heavier than I had planned, but still about 1/3 Noct for the lens and less than 1/2 Noct for the lens + camera. It feels really weird, but you can shoot hand-held using it in bright daylight.

I have first light images, but I'm NOT happy with them. The images produced with the current screen are very even and don't have any texture, but resolution is terrible: probably less than 1MP effective. Contrast is also very low. The fast aperture + apodization are working as intended in that bokeh are bigger and smoother than my Sony 100mm STF delivers.

You've found a sub-$20 f/1.5 lens that covers 4x5? Is it a single lens element or doublet or what?

Yes. It actually covers significantly more, but I'm just using a 7" diagonal because any bigger and it will not be 3D-printable by most folks. It does take about a day of print time. The lens is a single element, but I've added a homemade apodizing element in front of it. In the above photo, you might notice the lens looks darker toward the edges because of the apodizing element.

I'm feeling optimistic about a recent swap meet find for my 8x10-ish rig, a $10 4e/3g 320mm f/4.3 (specs roughly measured - it's some type of projector lens).

Although I'm not sure how much resolution I'm losing due to the lens vs. the screen, I'm sure anything like that will greatly out-resolve the lens I'm using.

Targeting PowerShots is fine for Faboky if CHDK is required - does the rig need multi-shot magic or could one shoot 68/0.38 equivalent videos?

With the current screen, vide can work. However, the screen makes the image quite dark and contrast is very low. With CHDK, it is fairly easy to program the camera to fix those issues as well as any vignetting / central hot spot (both iof which I expected, but don't actually have with the current screen).

I will post complete plans when I'm done with this, and maybe also a simple mount to use the apodized lens (280mm f/1.6, T/2.8 or so) directly on a DSLR or mirrorless... but I'm not yet happy enough with the resulting images.