The magic lantern camera

Started by zulex, January 15, 2015, 11:32:26 PM

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zulex

Hello Folks,

I've been following the magic lantern forum for a long time now, and one thing got my attention. (almost)Everytime someone asks for a feauture that's not possible, its due to the hardware of the camera's. Think of fast silent picture, or recording video at higher pixel rates with raw. Espessialy the last one is a big issue for most of the canon DSLR, and lets face it, Magic Lantern is more used by cinamatographers than photographers.

So my idea to fix the hardware issues is to make a own camera. I know this sounds a little to much to be taken serious, but pleas read on.

Making a camera requires 2 things, making the hardware for it, and the software.

We got a lot of good programmers on Magic Lantern, and if they could make a kickstarter of it, and have little marges on the camera, they can even hire people to program the software. So the software would be not a huge problem. The reverse-engineering of canon software probably takes more time than engineering itself.

The hardware would be a little harder I think. But there must be a way to contact manufacters for making camera's. I know that sony sells their sensors. We could also save a lot of money by removing some hardware, like the metal inside of the higher end DSLRs (this is awesome for proffesionals in extreme conditions, but not many of them are using Magic lantern.) I think that it's easily possible to make a camera for the half of the price canon does, if profit is not a priority, and maybe even less. We also need lenses, an easy solution is to make a mount that connects well with adapters. And just make an EF to that mount adapter. This way we can avoid conflicts with Canon. We could also use a really fast SD slot instead of CF. SD cards are way cheaper than CF and can get to 280mbps nowadays, and with our own hardware we could compress ourself and get 10bit 4k on this machine!. But the developers probably have better ideas about the body and software than I have.

Why would we want to do this work? Well first of all we could remove a lot of limitations, and really get the most out of a camera for little costs, what ML is actually based on. Second, we could force canon/sony/nikon/panasonic to even drop their prices more. And last, maybe we could have a dream camera for a dream price.

Let me know what you guys think, and hopefully the developers are able to kickstart this soon!



dmilligan


zulex

Quote from: dmilligan on January 15, 2015, 11:59:14 PM
maybe you missed this (right above your post under "Headline news"):
Magic Lantern joins forces with Apertus to create THE ultimate open source camera, thanks to your help!

Thank you for the link, and I've been looking for extra information for 2 hours now and got some critical points.

The idea of opensource is great, you could possibly get more out of a camera. But I wonder how many brands suffer from this. The only 2 i can think of are canon and nikon with their dslr series. Sony and Panasonic are doing great and there aren't many more feature request.

Secondly is the price range. The price for the gamma would be well under 10k, well under is still above the 5k. Add an external recorder(something thats needed to get most out of the camera) and its way more than for instance the sony a7s and gh4. actually the gh4 is only worse in terms of upgrading, and framerate.(even with the speedbooster+shogun its cheaper).

What I can conclude from this, opensource is a selling point, with emphasising selling.

I know a lot of the costs will be the developtment, but why at least tripling the cost of a gh4? And they also get lucky by the community who will help programming their software, an advantage panasonic and sony didn't have.

I like opensource, but that shouldn't be a reason to pay more for less.

chmee

The competitors are not gh4 or a7s, but possibly arri, panasonic pro, canon pro. the beta was ~2.900Eur with ef-mount while contribution-phase. a well documented hardware including base-source is nowhere on earth by now - so yes, imho its worth it.
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zulex

But isn't magic lantern all about the more consumer like camera's, or at least that was one of the reasons not porting to 1dc. So why join apertus when it's at least the same price range?

I think the axiom will be great, but i liked the magic lantern team for getting more quality out of normal consumer camera's. Just my two cents. And It seems that ML is getting less and less updates, is this because the crew is working with apertus?

Lars Steenhoff


Stedda

QuoteAnd It seems that ML is getting less and less updates, is this because the crew is working with apertus?

ML Devs are free to do what ever they want, they do not work for us. The code is open source so if you don't like the frequency of updates it's up to all of us to pickup where they left off.

They owe us nothing...
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