It’s taken a couple of days, but I am now able to make my second report on this intriguing sensor. Rather than setting up elaborate resolution assessment experiments, I jumped in feet-first, and cobbled up something to quickly capture a single frame of an 8mm film that was shot over 50 years ago, and which is typical of most of the films in my late father’s collection (shot with a Bolex B8 - the best available in its day). I needed to know if it was worth digging in deeper to put numbers on all aspects of its performance, something that I know could take some time.
Firstly, I had to decided on the optics to use with the sensor. A few experiments showed me that one of my best classic still camera lenses, reversed and used with extension tubes should give the super-macro performance needed for this initial exercise. Then I had to design and make a couple of components to hold everything securely together, yet allow some degree of adjustment. I used my 3D printer to do this. Here is what I came up with, which fits to a vintage Eumig P26 8mm projector which I have used before because of its bare simplicity coupled with superb quality engineering.
I just put a short length of film in the gate, and started playing. Here is one of the results, that was captured at 720p resolution.
It is immediately obvious that the image is ‘soft’ by modern standards, but that is all down to the image on the film, which is typical of all the 8mm stuff I have from that era. There may be a slight performance hit from my optics train, but I see well defined scratches that suggest it is probably not that significant. BTW, I purposely did not clean the film, as I would normally do.
This image has not been processed in any way, except for cropping, and shows how much the colour has drained over the years. So this test does not give much indication of the MC500 colour performance, except to say it looks just like this in an 8mm viewer/editor.
The main thing I wanted to know was its resolution capability. The picture below goes a long way to providing that.
It is an enlargement of the area in the first picture, near the bottom left, of the heads of two old ladies walking by, and includes a small tree branch. It is immediately obvious the resolution of the sensor is several times better than this image needs.
Draw your own conclusions from this, but I am inspired to perform much deeper technical assessments of this sensor not only for telecine, but also for other things I am involved in which normally need a DSLR, mainly for lens interchangeability.
Finally (please don’t laugh!) I’m going to try dispensing with the lens altogether, and use a pinhole approach instead. You never know…
Jeff