ChaosProjects.com

For some reason I’ve always wanted a video camera with a huge amount of zoom.
Why..? Well. For no good reason at all. I just did. That drew me to build the zoom converter..

This strange setup gave me a good idea about the aprox distance between the cam & the lens.

A little theory:
One of the major issues to get at good picture is the optic the light has to pass through, before it hits the LCD, CMOS etc.
And the cheapest way to get a quality lens and with the most amount of zoom, is by using your standard 35mm SLR optics of any brand. Even a lot of the cheapest ones will do. ( a standard 70-300mm costs aprox 160$). These optics are the ones with the biggest market share and there fore the cheapest and easiest to get.

The obvious choice of camera is the standard CCD surveillance-camera.
They are cheap and comes in a large variety of versions; Monochrome, color, one CCD, 3CCD, Low res, High res, High speed, etc. For my little experiment i just used a 50$ Monochrome CCD camera. (get them at ebay)

With these things in mind.
All i now needed was to build the converter pice between optic and camera.
Easier said than done… However since all my 35mm optics where Nikon. I bought an old Nikon camera and slaughtered it.. Loads of fun and half an hour later i got the pice i needed. Just the small bayonet couplingthat attaches the lens to the SLR camera. I also had an old CCD-camera that endured the same fate as the SLR-Camera. So now i also had the C-mount coupling to attach my converter to the surveillance-camera. I went a workshop to make me a small cylinder and a few other items to make it work..

I will soon admit… It isn’t pretty.. but it worked like a charm.

Oh! The agony.
When i two weeks later found that some other soul got the same idea…
And even got the nerve to mass-produce the converter i thought necessary to build myself. Back in the old 8mm days, a genius thought of using low-cost photo-optics on his 8mm video cam. To my fortune they come in all shapes and sizes… So, i rushed my credit-card through the web-teller and got myself quite a few different types. One of course being Nikon-adapteble… the rest is calibrating…

Then i just added my 500mm Mirror optic and no neighbor was safe for my ever watchful eye..

A little theory #2
The 35mm SLR photo optic is made for 35mm film the CCD in my camera is 1/8 of this. Thus. I will gain x8 the amount of zoom the lens holds… 500×8=4000mm. NICE LENS!!!

Success!!