Surplus Shed's Electronic Shutter

[zack]

Hi everybody,

I haven't been active around here for a while, but I thought I'd share an interesting discovery I made the other day.

Surplus Shed has a bunch of these electronic shutters right now:
http://www.surplusshed.com/pages/item/m3259.html

As you can see, they're cheap. I bought one and I've got it set up and working perfectly. It'll eventually make it into a new LF camera I'm building. The shutter assembly is controlled by a simple solenoid. It also has flash sync.

24 Volts seems to be what it takes to drive the shutter. It does work at 12, but the blades seem a little sluggish. I put together a simple relay circuit for mine so I could control it from a PocketWizard. The MultiMAX I'm using works great for a number of reasons:

* I can specify the shutter speed by setting specific contact times in the MutliMAX.

* I can do neat multiple exposure things with the Intervalometer feature.

* The Multipop feature lets me fire the shutter REALLY fast, which not only looks and sounds awesome, but will also lend itself to some even neater multiple exposure projects.

* Since it's a PocketWizard, I can fire the shutter wirelessly.


I've put together a few videos showing the shutter in action. Here's the first:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEif9X8hABQ

and the second (high speed drive mode):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgBEKz6Y8kY


There's still a bunch left to do. I need to figure out just how the contact times in the MultiMAX relate to actual shutter speeds, since I'm going through a relay and a solenoid. I haven't hooked up the x-sync yet, but it's a very simple switch and my multimeter says it works fine. Of course there's the whole process of mounting a lens on it and getting it in a working camera too...

Anyway, just thought I'd share.

-Zack

[vinny]

very cool. ease up on the coffee next time you decide to pick up a video camera

[zack]

I blame a one-handed iPhone

[Steven Tribe]

"Sorry - this item is currently unavailable"

[Steven Tribe]

And guess what! One of my least favorite sellers (with restricted insight in things optical and photographic - and especialy their market value) suddenly has one for sale (you know where) with a text that seems taken from the Shed place! Price is no longer $15.

[Mike1234]

Who is this "least favorite seller"?

[erie patsellis]

781 in stock @ $99 BIN??? d'bag doesn't even start to describe how I feel about people like this.

[Mike1234]

I have ten various solenoid activated shutters pulled from repro cameras and a dozen controllers. Most of them are larger (some much larger) than the one at SS. However, I don't have the time right now to figure out the wiring to make them work.

[Jim Graves]

So if he purchased their entire stock of 781, one can reasonably assume he paid less than the advertised price of $15 apiece ... let's guess around $10 apiece for that volume which would total $7,810.

Now selling at $99 apiece ... that is an 800% markup. All he has to do is sell 79 to get his money out and the other 702 pieces are gravy ... should he actually be able to sell those, his profit would be $69,500!

A gouge or a smart investment?

The bay sale # is 280454928991

[Jim C.]

Surplus Shed had them on sale for $ 7.50 via an email flyer