Recalibrating 40/160 cams

[etimh]

What's the current experience and/or opinions about going in to 40/160 only cams and recalibrating the exposure for other stocks? Has anybody here done it or tried it at all? Have any opinions about it?

I know for most of the junk cameras it would simply be a waste of time, but I got an Agfa Microflex several years back that had been modified by this guy to read the 64T and it worked wonderfully and I got some great footage.

Now that the 64T is gone I was hoping I could try to find somebody to again go in and modify it and recalibrate it again for yet another stock. Techies, what exactly does it entail? Could I try to do it myself?

Thanks in advance.

Tim

[kuparikettu]

Depends on the camera. I recalibrated my Bauer A512 for Vision3 stocks: 50D/200T. It was quite easy, because I received good instructions from a guy who had almost ten years ago calibrated my camera to 64T.

In my case I only had to open the cover of the camera, revealing the potentiometers. Then I put an empty cartridge (first one notched for 40T, then 160T) in the camera and turned the potentiometers until the aperture shown matched with the value I got from my external spot meter.

I have since then shot many cartridges -- but I haven't seen the results yet, so I'm very excited / anxious to receive a certain package from Andec next week ;)

[aj]

For some cameras there are instructions online to equip them with an ISO adjuster. I.e. solder out a trimmer and fix a wired potentiometer on the housing somewhere.

Many have indeed internal adjusters which were used in factory to tune them fine for a 40/160. Sometimes these are easy to find. Othertimes they are behind cover plates, glued or on the other side of the electronics board.

Don't forget to mark the start position of the slider such that it can easily be brought back

There was a guy from Luxembourg with the adams64 modification for many S8 cameras. Unfortunately he never bothered with answering email or whatever. Now his website was reworked advertising a long roll S8 magazine and a project to equip S8 cameras with a HD-sensor to make them usable as video-camera.