Archive for the 'Covert' Category
Super zoom on a surveillance camera
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.
Portable DV HDD Recorder
I was looking for a portable HDD Recorder that could record from an analogue signal (your standard Composite or S-VHS). Although there’s a wide range of neat products that can do exactly this, I wasn’t thrilled about the fact that they all compressed the video to Mpeg4. Furthermore, I wanted a device that would record in full DV.
In order to get one that could meet my demands, I would have to build one myself.
I figured such a device is roughly build of three parts:
