Anyone try one of these? They look pretty good.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Shutter-Tester-f...item27ae085bfc
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Anyone try one of these? They look pretty good.
http://cgi.ebay.com/Shutter-Tester-f...item27ae085bfc
I haven't used one but I agree they do look pretty good. Did you buy it? That seems a good price.
I'm also interested in other peoples opinions on the device.
Too much. I could make a similar device for <30, including LCD readout. I suppose that means I should be in the business myself.
Too risky. No picture. You would be trading with a lawless country (at least where consumers are concerned).
I don't see that there's that much risk. He is an ebay employee, 1400 purchases with 100% positive feedback and he's sold 13 of these gadgets.
I agree. Mr. Zhou is a reputable dealer. I've seen a lot of his stuff, especially his Leica cases, which are quite nice. I know that one of those testers can be made for a lot less, but when you are as handy with a soldering iron as I am, it pays to have someone market this item.
I have one of these - works accurately (even more so if you combine it with a laser pointer). It rather looks as if it is a refined small series production of the shutter timer once published by the German/Dutch electronics DIY mag Elektor/Elektuur - which was back then about 60DM for the parts kit and two or three hours assembly, without case or power supply, so $120 is fair, even more so considering that I'd have to spend a couple of hours locating the parts (or current replacements) individually nowadays.
Sevo
Some guy from another forum used this free audio recording software (I downloaded it, but have not used it). Wat you do is you record the opening and the closing sounds. Then you can measure accurately the time. The program can be found here:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
I have one of these too... they're branded "OMES"
sure, it looks like a simple device that someone who does electronics might knock up pretty cheaply at home but for most people getting all the parts and tools and then making one would be prohibitive so I think the asking price is actually very fair. I haven't used a soldering iron for over 20 years and I'd never finish the project!
overall, I'm glad I bought it. I've used it to check several old shutters and flagged one I wanted to mount an old barrel lens into as behaving very erratic so that one got sent off for service before I wasted any time/film shooting with it. Fortunately most of my shutters seem to be close enough to marked times that I won't worry about the errors.
I can now get an objective speed for my packard shutters and toy cameras etc but, for me, the main value has been measuring how consistently a shutter runs.
I downloaded this and tried it, and it seems to work ok for the slower speeds (1/15th sec to 1 sec), but the "start" and "finish" is too fuzzy to see for the faster speeds - possibly unless you know exactly what you're looking at, which I don't.
I wonder if it's reasonably safe to assume that if you're ok at the slower speeds the faster ones are probably ok?
No - common modern shutters have three escapements and springs between which they switch at defined thresholds, even a perfectly timed range need not mean that the shutter is not outright broken in another. Besides, clumsy DIY repairs do mostly "correct" a flaw by introducing a second level of maladjustment. Usually, shutters dragging at slow speeds end up sprayed with grease, and will be too fast at mid-range speeds, only to slow down again at the fastest speed or two (where the grease acts as a viscosity brake).
They work .But you can make one for less than $40.00 and it is going to work in the same way .You can even one for $10.00 and use your computer to read the results through a sound card and it is guaranteed to work as a $1000.00 shutter tester !
The pictures look nice, the seller is reputable, the fact that others could make one for less is irrelevant since they haven't offered to make one for you, so if you want a shutter speed tester why not give it a try.
The Audacity software is good; however, I use it with an OPTICAL sensor that plugs into the microphone input. Built it for cheap from simple schematics. Shining a strong light source through the shutter, Audacity detects and displays a "sound" (actually a light) wave that corresponds to the shutter opening and closing. Circuitry resides in a little 35mm film canister with an external AA battery. I think the whole shebang cost me less than $10 and a little solder.
before purchasing on the Omes testers I tried to use my sound card. I almost have it working. I can see a response on the editing program but I bought a stereo jack instead of mono and can't seem to get the wiring quite right. If some has done this can you please chime in and let me what I am doing wrong. I used this schematic.
http://www.nikonhs.org/tech_articles/stester.html
You may not need any resistors in the cicuit. My 15" Mac Book Pro has an auto level detect on the
Line-In. My tester couldn't be simpler to build-- a very satisfying project.
I've had some DIY photo pages for ages now - among them plans for TWO shutter testers.
The first version is a design that I found on the net, but the original web site is long gone (was hosted on Geocities...).
The second version was invented by a friend, and does not need either a separate power source (no batteries), or a light source - it has a bright LED as light source , and everything is powered from USB computer port.
The friend who designed it does not speak English, but I got his permission to make the plans and design available for free to everyone :)
Anyway, HERE you'll find both versions, plus some other stuff which might be of interest.
Paul Dixon sells testers on fleabay. You can contact him at pauldixon@cox.net. I'm not affiliated with him. His testers are the simple DIY testers but they are accurate when used with Audacity and cheap (for those of us that don't want to spend the time on the soldering). In the past I have sent a few to Carol so I used her notes to confirm. I burned quite a few sheets of film when I had the shutter tester in my drawer. My timings are all consistent so I'm in no rush to send them all to Carol.
And "sounds right" is meaningless.
Has anyone tried this? Easy and no soldering required.
http://decisivemomentum.blogspot.com...er-tester.html
Yes John, I followed that fella's suggestions and used my Canon DSLR to test some focal plane shutters on Graflex cameras. Worked great after a bit of fiddling.
I had done some work on one of the shutters with a buddy's oscilloscope/photocell setup and the numbers agreed. I also used a Schneider lens in Copal shutter as proof of the method. So I am happy to proceed to test the next shutters that cross my path.
Go ahead and give it a try ... certainly easier than messing with Audacity which I hated ... good luck ... J
I tried the Audacity method as well. It seems to work OK for slower shutter speeds like under 1/125. Anything over this it becomes hard to sort out the curve and tell when the shutter opens and closes. My computer has a 5 VDC output on microphone input. I just wired this through a phototransistor and it generally worked but as I said at the lower speeds. I tried messing around with resistors and capacitors like shown on the schematics all over the internet but it didn't make a difference. Unless some one can jump in and let me know I need to do get reliable shutter readings via my sound card I guess I will have to bite the bullet and buy the real thing.
Art
I've used the Audacity method also. It seemed to work fine, and I thought up to about 1/250th on most of my cams (Pentax SV, Nikon FE/FM) and LF lens. However, I noticed that when I tried to use it on my Nikon F, it was very difficult to sort out the start and end. I'm wondering if it can't vary by camera shutter design and implementation also. Anyway, seemed good enough for gov't work.
The Audacity method only works as well as your phototransistor and the selected sampling rate allow. I bought a fast-switching transistor (~10 microseconds and 10X the price of a Radio Shack one but still only $13).
For the money and the minimum of effort, this has to be one of the best hacks ever.
where did you buy the fast switching phototransistor?
Yes, I tried this, but could only get a reading at very slow speeds, Above about 1/20 second the wave form was unreadable, and I never was able to get the square wave shown on the website. Perhaps I had the wrong capacitor, photocell, or had not set up the program the way I should? Oh well...
I just built and used a shutter tester of this sort. I was able to measure the 1/400 speed on my graphex shutter (which apparently a full stop slow, c'est la vie). With a bit of improvement to the design I'm sure it could measure a few stops faster fairly reliably.
My soundcard was supplying 2V on the ring, which I understand is likely through a 2k resistor internally. I used an NTE 3034A phototransistor that I bought at Fry's (NTE is one of the more common semiconductor suppliers for retail stores.) I hooked it up as a common emitter amplifier with a DC blocking capacitor to the connector tip. (power to the collector, collector to the cap to the output, emitter to ground.) I'd show a schematic, but I don't have a good way to draw it up at the moment. Use the smallest ceramic cap you can find (I think mine was a 1.5uF cap). At the faster shutter speeds I had to be careful where I measured from as the charging time of the cap was noticeable (about 1ms).
Using an external power source might be necessary to reduce the source impedance so that I can get a faster charge time on the cap. I could possibly try another configuration without a cap, but I really don't want DC coupling into my sound card. The sampling rate on the sound card is 44.1kHz, so if the circuit is good, the sound card should be able to easily resolve shutter speeds as fast as 1/2000.
I put together my own circuit for this and was working out a way to make a digital read-out, but the digital camera testing method is SOOOO simple that I quit. Just put the camera facing a well lit circuit and you can test all the shutter speeds really quickly AND get an idea of what the amount of variance really means.
I use older lenses and shutters so it is really useful to see the results of a slightly slower top speed on the image instead of just knowing that it is 0.0138 seconds slow.
I bought one of the below testers that is made like the schematics we see:
Pre-made shutter tester from "Lurchrider"
I plugged it into the mic input of an EMU external soundcard and recorded using Audacity (which is free). I turned the record level control all the way up.
When the diode triggers when light appears, the voltage output is a positive spike. When the light goes away, there is a negative spike. The spike on the graph comes (necessarily) after the change in light reaching the diode, so I just "selected" (in Audacity) from the leading edge of the first (positive) spike to the leading edge of the next (negative) spike. I was able to measure all the speeds of all my shutter easily.
My test technique was to remove the rear cell of the lens, hold the tester up against the rear of the shutter, centered as well as possible, set the aperture to wide open, and then hold the lens board/tester combination in my left hand. With my right hand, I started the record mode of Audacity, cocked the shutter, pointed it to an incandescent desk lamp, released the shutter, cocked and fired the shutter three more times, and then stopped the recording. All four firings easily fit in a 10-second window. Then, I ignore the first firing, and zoom into each of the remaining three. Once zoomed in, I select the sound file between the peaks as described above, and read the information line about the selection, which includes the elapsed time. I recorded that in a spreadsheet.
I set up the spreadsheet to average those three readings, and then provide an error in stops by taking the log of the ratio of the actual time and the nominal time and dividing that by the log of 2.
It took me three hours to test 8 lenses, including downloading and installing Audacity, building the spreadsheet, and conducting all the tests. Repeat tests will take only an hour at most.
I was able to test even 1/500 speeds with good reliability. My general result was that my Compurs were pretty good at the fast speeds and draggy at the slow speeds, while the Copals were pretty good at the slow speeds but optimistic at the fast speeds. The best shutters were within a quarter stop up and down the range of useful speeds, but none were perfect. I now keep the resulting table in my bag.
Yes, I could have built the tester for maybe half what this one cost, but I would have had to order the photo-transistor--Radio Shack only sells IR-sensitive photo-transistors in their typical floor plan. Buying it complete was worth it just for the time savings, and would be especially so for those who don't own soldering irons.
Rick "who'll start sending in the worst ones for a CLA" Denney
FYI, the radioshack IR sensor will work fine with a desk lamp or similar light source.
Okay. Too bad Radio Shack doesn't provide any technical description of the device so that one buying it would be able to know that.
Anyway, sometimes I'm in the mood for a project and sometimes I just want it to work. This time, I just wanted it to work. <$40 requires no justification; >$100 for something like a Calumet tester does.
I found it easier to use than a Calumet tester, by the way. With that, even the pulsing of AC from an incandescent bulb caused problems, and I had to use a DC-power flashlight as the light source for that tester. It saved the step of measuring the pulses in Audacity, but required a trickier setup. I borrowed one once to test medium-format shutters some years ago.
Rick "thinking that mic input is a pretty useful general A/D sampler" Denney
Yep. Been there myself.
I've been thinking about using a microcontroller and LCD to make a field-usable shutter speed tester, but the computer-interfacing ones actually have the advantage that you can precisely pick out the beginning of the voltage spikes, and intelligently discard noise and other weird results. So I could make one, but it wouldn't be better than a sound-card one.
I came up with my own shutter speed tester that measures what counts; to me, that is. Shutters are supposed to let light through them for a given amount of time. Leaf shutters inside lenses have a transit time between their closed and full-open positions. For a given shutter speed, I think a lens with a smaller f/stop will have a longer "open" time than what a larger f/stop has. So I wanted a method to show the actual amount of light that gets through the shutter during its cycle time. Here's what I came up with.
Most electric motors turn at about 1750 rpm. They'll make one turn in about 1/30th second. If you put a black round thing (pulley?) on it with a white spot at its edge then take a picture of it spinning, that spot will make a circular blur on the image plane while the shutter's open. Each end will have light fall off as the shutter opens and closes. To see exactly what your motor turns that pulley in 1/60th of a second, use a decent digital camera to take a picture of it. Here's what my pulley looks like; a reflective white square's at the edge spinning at about 1750 rpm using a digital SLR's speedlight:
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1185/...f417b05d_m.jpg
Here's the pulley picture taken at 1/60th second with the same camera; note the grey blur starting at the top then ending about 162 degrees clockwise:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4149/...41682eb5_m.jpg
The spot's arc should have been about 175 degrees at 1750 rpm. As the arc's only about 162 degrees, that translates to about 1890 rpm.
This is how I calibrated the motor speed using a very accurate 1/60th shutter. Comparing a test picture using the shutter under test to this one will show how accurate it is. A drill press spindle spinning at a lower speed will work for shutter speeds below 1/60 second. Plans are to get a really flat black paint (or something else) so there's better contrast between the white spot and the pulley.
I'm working on the setup to test my Graflex 1000 shutter. Plans are to use the DSLR to photograph the Super Speed Graphic's ground glass in a dark environment showing the bright-light illuminated reflector making traces. Grade school math can be used to determint acutal shutter speed by how many degrees rotation the spot has.
Comments, suggestions are welcomed.
Bart
Jack, a "turn table" is that thing your 90-inch HD television sits on so you can swivel it around to see it head-on from anywhere in your huge entertainment room. And "TV" stands for Terrific Vehicle; what I call my BMW Z3 coupe. (my left eye's winking.....) I, too, thought of an LED; I've got one on a quarter-sized key-fob flashlight that I could afix to the pulley. Then take pictures in a darkened room and that bright point of light will be great to use. That fob-LED laying on a phonograph turn table will be great for testing slow shutter speeds; plenty accurate, too.
Denis, thanks for the link showing other moving things photographed to measure shutter speeds. I'm not surprised someone else thought of this method. I like the idea about using a phono turntable for slower speeds; I'll use mine to do that; it's 3 speeds make it very useful. I got the idea of a pully on a motor from back in 1959 when I got my Nikon S3 rangefinder camera. Set up an HP oscilloscope to make a circle on the screen, then took pictures of it at different shutter speeds. The circle was only about 1/8th inch diameter on the slides so the focal plane shutter wouldn't effect the results too much.
Seems I forgot something that may be crucial to the issue.
If Nikon's shutter electronics in their D40 is exact double/half from a given full stop setting starting from 1 second, setting the shutter to 1/60th would be 1/64 second. At 1750 rpm, that dot will travel about 164 degrees. Which now convinces me that my reasoning was a bit flawed before. It's probably the same thing as f/stops where only f/2, f/4, f/8.... and doubles thereafter are exact. Apertures of f/4.5, f/5.6, f/11, f/22.... are not exact, but just easy things to remember for settings inbetween the exact ones.
There's easily a 2 degree error in my measuring techniques for that arc of grey shown in the picture. It's a fluke that the difference I thought was caused by an outlet voltage to spec'd on the motor would cause the same error.
My reasoning's got a lot of scar tissue on it. It's been flawed many times over the years. What's another one or two...........
When I was writing the software for my light meter, I had to resist the urge to create a 'real' shutter speed scale that actually doubled at each setting, like
1 1/2 1/4 1/8 1/16 1/32 1/64 1/128 1/256 1/512 1/1024
Most cameras have scales that go like this
1 1/2 1/4 1/8 1/15 1/30 1/60 1/125 1/250 1/500 1/1000
Bowing to convention, I wasted memory on an entire array of unique shutter speeds just so that the numbers look normal. It's hard to know what digital-operating cameras do internally. I would imagine they use the top scale, since it's very close to conventional shutter speeds and much more efficient to implement in software.
I never understood why we buy 100 and 400 speed film but have to make do with 1/125 and 1/500 shutter speeds.
I'm sure digital controlled shutters do operate in exact double/halve increments. 'Tis easy with binary systems.
There's a bunch of numbering standards for several things; for example:
The original meter as defined by the French government was one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the center of Paris. It's changed a tiny bit over the years.
Circular mil, four standards from 1/6000th to 1/6400 thousandths of a circle.
Mile, US Navy radar range is 2000 yards per mile (at least it was when I served), statute mile's got 1760 yards and a nautical mile's about 2027 yards (larger in the southern hemisphere, smaller up north).
Then there's the Baker's Dozen.......
And in the computer age, the complete set of binary groups below that computer's "eat" at one time as explained by a former Univac engineer to me when I worked at Sperry Gyroscope:
Bit, a single unit
Snyff, 2 bits
Nybble, 4 bits
Byte, 8 bits
Chomp, 16 bits
Gobble, 32 bits.
HI to all,
A couple of years ago I made my own shutter speed tester. It works perfectly and is very cheap and easy to do.
Following I enclose the links to the forum where you can find the information
http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-...ster-step.html
http://www.l-camera-forum.com/leica-...ed-tester.html
If you need more information feel free to contact me.
Regards
Arturo
Oops!!! I was weak in being right; that's better than being wrong. Checked my reference and sure enough, it's the North Pole that's ten million metres north of the equator.
That famous landmark at the center of Paris (48° 51′ 12.24″ N, 2° 20′ 55.68″ E) is about 5,432,060.353 metres north of the equator. To me, the French though in much larger, more worldly scales in establishing this great standard. The "yard" and "foot" originations were based on the dimensions of a couple of human body parts.
France; best place I saw there was the Palace of Versailles. Neat place, indeed.
Well, I haven't liked any of the shutter testers I've seen - they all have limitations that make them difficult if not impossible to use in the field.
So I made one that would be easy for me to use when I'm out trying to get a shot and want to know what compensation I need to use to cope with my old shutter's inaccuracy.
I decided that to be most useful it needed to meet these criteria:
It needed to fit in my pocket or my camera bag.
It needed to be battery operated so I could carry it into the field, and should be kind to the batteries.
It needed to show me the shutter speed in fractional and decimal formats: Fractional as in "1/xxx" where xxx might be 2.00 for a half second, and decimal so when I test the one second setting It's easy to read (1/0.96 for a slightly slow shutter is not intuitive).
It needed to "just work" - turn it on, set your lens over it, pointed at the sky, trip the shutter and get a reading.
I've got it working very well, and it meets the above criteria - It uses a little switching power supply to squeeze out dozens of hours of run time from a pair of AA batteries, and when it detects a measurable doze of light it toggles continuously between fractional and decimal representations with a 2-second pause between.
Here's a couple of pics of the prototype on the bench. I'm laying out a circuit board now so I can make a version to fit into a nice case.
When you post the the drum scans of your images. :p
I'm currently unemployed and am thinking of selling these to make a little income once I get them into a presentable form. If it helps me continue to be able to buy film, it's worth my effort.
I don't imagine there's a big market for the device, but if I make the most useful one out there and offer it at a reasonable price to users of no-longer-manufactured-and-slowly-aging shutters, it might sell.
But that's at least a couple of months away. I haven't even started laying out the board. I've just been coding and building the prototype, and have finished some in-the-workshop testing.
I'll start a list. :D