Would you buy a 100mm LCD shutter for $400?

[Shutter]

Only in special cases, otherwise even specs and dust particles in lenses would be visible - and I never ever saw that, even with an f-stop of 45 or higher...

[miss_emma_jade]

http://www.liquidcrystaltechnologies...iderations.htm this kinda rules it out doesnt it?

[polyglot]

http://www.liquidcrystaltechnologies...iderations.htm this kinda rules it out doesnt it?

Except, as per previous postings, that applies to (S)TN cells. Pi cells don't have the viewing-angle issues.

[cyberjunkie]

That would make the dark state darker, but would add to all the other problems, unless you could persuade a manufacturer to make a monolithic unit with two stacked light valves one on top of the other.

I suspect that would be much more expensive, certainly more expensive than learning to keep the lens cap on until ready to shoot. For most shooting you would have time to manually remove a cap, wait a few seconds for vibrations to die down, take the shot, and then put the cap back on. Bright lights at night, particularly ones that move are more likely to be a problem than taking a regular daylight shot.



Sure. There may be finesse involved in matching the drive circuit to large areas, but for a simple on-off-variable ND arrangement you only need a single big electrode front and back. Using a pattered LCD to make variable apertures, or to filter colour, would require the equivalent of a flat panel screen with an addressable array of electrodes or drive transistors, which is not impossible, but will cost. I don't even know if existing applications include such spatially varying panels - the ones I've seen are used as shutters for things like stereo projection of alternating left and right eye images.



I think this exactly the sort of use the OP envisaged. I have a Sinar shutter which goes up to 1/60s (nominal) but it throttles some of the lenses I have, which seems against the spirit of having all that lovely glass.
.......
Limiting the transmissivity of the 'open' cell should also be easy, and as you say, for fast lenses in bright daylight it could be useful to be able to use the shutter as a programmable ND filter.

I couldn't agree more.
The best solution for big, fast, giant lenses currently is the Sinar/Copal shutter.
Unfortunately it's limited to slow speed (which sort of defeats the scope of acquiring expensive soft focus or fast portrait lenses, if you must use them stopped down!), and it's also a vibration machine
Many professionals happily used the Sinar shutter for years, but the main use was in studio, with FLASH!
That way the vibrations are of no concern... and the Sinar gives its best.

Whatever it is your opinion about Sinar/Copal vibrations, the lack of fast speeds makes it a poor match for fast lenses, which must be used wide open to get the image quality they're famous for.
An LCD substitute, with max speed of 1/500sec, would be almost perfect. 10cm internal diameter is already very good, and sufficient for the most part of those lenses, but i agree that a 14cm shutter would wide enough for the vast majority of those brass chimneys i find so attractive (and which i would not be able to afford in the foreseeable future )

400 USD isn't exactly cheap for a shutter (you can get a working Sinar for much less), though i don't think that's so much, if we consider the kind of lenses which would be matched to such a shutter, and their PRICE.
We all know that there are people who would happily pay 4/5000 USD for a nice Perscheid, so i think that $400 for a shutter that allows them to shoot wide open would be considered perfectly acceptable, if not outright cheap!

BTW, if a very small series would be 400, and IF the first batch works well, i am sure that there would be more interest than what we could expect as of today.
Not a large scale, industrial item, but probably a few hundred pieces. Such number would make the shutter somewhat cheaper to produce, and a better price would increase the number of interested parties.
Just speculating... unfortunately i am not so sure that a LCD shutter (good for the intended application, and with no major optical flaws) would be feasible at a do-it-yourself level.

have fun

CJ