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.

For one of my projects I needed a way to get a huge amount of zoom for the lowest possible dollar. What I came up with was the zoom-converter.
The one on the picture above (made mostly from Manfrotto components)
is actually my second version. The first was made from various scrap metal
from bikes etc. which worked rather well, but wasn’t as stable as the second version.

The concept of the construction is very simple; The main thing is to fixate the camera lens
exactly behind the occular of the telescope. The simplicity of this concept makes it usable in
a large variety of combinations: Webcam, Camcorder, Digital camera, Surveillance camera,
Telescope, Nightvision, Thermal scope, etc. (This can also be done with just some pieces of wood aligning almost any sort of camera behind the ocular of almost any kind of monocular)

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: