Digital Imaging: Reviews

Nokton 58mm F1.4 SL II

Tue, 25 Dec 2007 20:12:20 GMT

In November 2007, Cosina/Voigtländer announced the Ultron 40mm F2 SL II and
the Nokton 58mm F1.4 SL II for Nikon and Pentax systems.
http://www.cosina.co.jp/seihin/voigt/v-lens/sl2/58sl2/index.html

The Nokton 58mm F1.4 SL II for Nikon arrived!

The lens is all metal with manual focus and feels very solid.

The Nokton is a CPU lens and meters on all Nikon DSLR.
The aperture ring needs to be set to f/16 (orange).

All samples are shot with f/1.4:

Unlike the Nikkor f/1.4 50mm, at f/1.4 the Nokton delivers excellent results.
The depth of field is then very shallow of course and can be difficult to set.
In the viewfinder, a green dot is displayed for subjects in focus in the center frame
(The AF mode is set to Single Area [.]).

f/1.6 1/40s (handheld)

1:1 crop lower-left corner

f/1.4 1/10s (tripod)

1:1 crop

f/2.0 1/60s

1:1 crop

f/3.2 1/125s

1:1 crop

f/2.5 1/100s

f/2.5 1/80s

f/3.5 1/200s

f/2.8 1/125s

Lossless splitting

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 00:20:31 GMT

The lossless splitting is lossless JPEG feature in addition to the lossless crop in cPicture.

Select the picture and click on the start menu entry (menu entry "Picture task") on "Split panorama".

This feature is one of the most used features used in the panoramic world to print sections of a large panoramic picture!

Select the aspect ratio and the number of rows to split the picture.
All individual pictures will be stored in the supplied folder with a sequence number.
Print these individual pictures to get a huge wall paper for example.

The split is done without recompressing the picture!

No loss in quality or need to choose a compression setting!

You can even specify a horizontal/vertical overlap to account for the glueing area.

With the Landscape mode you can match the orientation.

Fisheye MC Zenitar-N 16mm f/2.8 Lens

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 20:07:12 GMT

Fisheye MC Zenitar-N 16mm f/2.8 Lens

The Zenitar 16mm f/2.8 is a manual focus/aperture full frame fisheye lens manufactured in Krasnogorsk/Russia. The full frame (the covered rectangle of the projected image circle) covers 180 degree FOV in diagonal on 35mm. See http://wiki.panotools.org/Fisheye_Projection and http://wiki.panotools.org/Special_issues_with_fisheye_lenses.

The lens is available for different mounts (M42, Nikon, Canon, ...). Zenitar-N is the model with a built-in Nikon F-mount and that is the model I ordered:

Here it is. Arrived in a weather proof bag from Russia:

Protected against (mail carrier) shocks:

With the seal already broken:

Inside the nylon case

wrapped in butter-bread paper and authentical Russian manual:

And individually certified:

And it fits on the Camera (Nikon D-50)

With three additional color filters available

which get screwed in (at the F-Mount side):

But there was problem. The lens didn't focused to infinity. Instead the lens focused from 0.05m to about 1m. The picture were really sharp there, almost like a macro, but no one needs a fisheye macro. Sending back the lens? I already waited three weeks and being an engineer...

Why does the lens doesn't focus at infinity?
For some reason the distance settings ring wasn't aligned with the lens setting. Infinity for the distance ring didn't match the position for the internal lens ring. See the left drawing. With the wrong aligned distance ring, the distance range of the lens is shifted from 0.3m-infinity to 0.05m-1m.

How to fix this?
The distance ring needs to be aligned with the internal lens ring to allow the lens to be focused to infinity. This is illustrated in the right drawing. With the new aligned distance ring, the infinity distance can now be set. The minimal distance moved up from the 0.05 to the 0.3m.

The first step is to move back the rubber ring of the distance ring. Do not use any sharp tools, just slide the rubber back on one side a little bit and go around in a few circles to move it back slowly. On the lens barrel you will see three small holes (every 120 degree around the barrel) with a very small screw inside.

There are also three very tiny holes for the lens hood. Be careful with the tiny screws. Choose a screwdriver that matches the size perfectly. Do not use one that is too small. You might break the screw. (You screw up the lens!).

To have the lens focus to infinity, the lens hood needs to be adjusted as well. When you rotate the distance ring to infinity, the lens barrel extents towards the lens hood and might be blocked there preventing the lens extending to the infinity setting.

Don't remove the screws holding the distance ring. Just unscrew until the distance ring moves without being attached to the internal ring. Rotate the distance ring towards a smaller distance and tight the screws just to move the internal ring towards infinity. Look at the illustration above. You are moving the outer distance ring to shift the internal distance ring.
For the lens I received the infinity settings was exactly at the stop position of the internal distance ring. I had to move the ring as much as possible towards the infinity setting and the adjust the outer distance ring to match the red mark with the infinity symbol.
Once this is done, carefully tight the screws and slide the rubber ring back.

The Nikon D-50 for example cannot meter with this lens and the internal flash is disabled. You need to use the manual setting, set the exposure time manually and use an external flash (SB600/800) set to manual mode if you want to use a flash. At f/5.6 the lens seems to have an optimal aperture.

Some samples:

With the sun in the front:

http://cpicture.net/zenitar

Review of Italian version on aiutamici.com

Wed, 02 Aug 2006 17:26:48 GMT

aiutamici.com is a very popular Italian website for all great things on the net.

Read their review of cPicture!

http://www.aiutamici.com/software/descrizione.asp?CodSw=1420

cPicture

cPicture è un programma straordinario, permette di visualizzare le anteprime immagini, effettuare ritocchi come occhi rossi, ridimensione, impostazione di immagine come sfondo del desktop e tanto altro, può essere utilizzato come player MP3 e formati video, il tutto senza necessità di installazione, gratuito e in Italiano. Funziona con tutti i Windows dal 95 alle versioni successive.

...

Review of cPicture on impress.co.jp

Wed, 25 Jan 2006 18:11:46 GMT

Review of cPicture on impress.co.jp

http://www.forest.impress.co.jp/article/2006/01/25/cpicture.html

http://www.forest.impress.co.jp is a webzine about Windows online
software at Impress Watch Corporation, Tokyo, Japan.

"Windows Forest" is a known online software directory service in
Japan and has 34 millions page views per month.

Download-Tipp des Tages vom 19.01.2006

Mon, 23 Jan 2006 04:14:55 GMT

Download-Tipp des Tages vom 19.01.2006

http://oncomputer.t-online.de

cPicture 1.6.1

cPicture ist ein gelungenes Anzeige- und Slideshow-Programm für digitale Bilder, das den Umgang mit Digitalkamera-Fotos erheblich erleichtert. Die Bilder lassen sich wahlweise in einer Vorschau oder im Vollbildmodus anzeigen.

Download cPicture

System: Windows 2000/95/98/ME/NT/XP
Sprache: Deutsch
Größe: 961,5 KB

cPicture on http://web.planet.nl

Thu, 29 Dec 2005 00:42:05 GMT

cPicture is the download of the week: http://web.planet.nl/planetdownload/pd147.php

cPicture on http://www.stahuj.cz

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 02:44:26 GMT

cPicture on one of the big czech sites:

http://www.stahuj.cz/grafika_a_design/spravafotografii/cpicture-le/

Review of cPicture in digifocus.it

Fri, 10 Jun 2005 00:25:52 GMT

http://www.digifocus.it

(The archived link is http://www.digifocus.it/01NET/HP/0,1254,6_ART_61303,00.html )

The site is in italian. http://babelfish.altavista.com/ is quite good with this.