Macro Variogon

[ray_parkhurst]

What experience do folks have with the Schneider Macro Variogon series of lenses? The are C-mount with big zoom range and wide aperture. Any use for our purposes?

Edited to add: I am thinking of their use with the C-mount FHD type of camera I had reviewed previously. I guess there are versions of this camera that will send full resolution over USB, so could be useful for the "low mag large DOF" type of imaging.

[dolmadis]

Hi Ray


I don't have any information to add on the Variogons.


But I have read with interest thediscussion you led here.

https://www.photomacrography.net/forum/ ... =mount+fhd  

I have been looking at a number of c mount lenses, zoom and fixed, to pair with one of the Touptek (or similar) LC3MOS USB Cameras which has "live stitching".


http://www.touptek.com/news/shownews.php?lang=en&id=62 


I might have had one of these by now but the European Distributor based in the UK doesn't seem to be to able to get me a price !!
My best guess is around GBP 400.

http://www.touptek.com/product/showprod ... g=en&id=70

My notion was to get a slick live stitch and stack the stitches but not just slide based material but typical macro subjects on a vertical rig.


Any thoughts on this? 


There is standalone software from various lab suppliers but the price on quotation is too high.


BR



John

[ray_parkhurst]

I have been looking at a number of c mount lenses, zoom and fixed, to pair with one of the Touptek (or similar) LC3MOS USB Cameras which has "live stitching".


http://www.touptek.com/news/shownews.php?lang=en&id=62 


I might have had one of these by now but the European Distributor based in the UK doesn't seem to be to able to get me a price !!
My best guess is around GBP 400.

http://www.touptek.com/product/showprod ... g=en&id=70

My notion was to get a slick live stitch and stack the stitches but not just slide based material but typical macro subjects on a vertical rig.

Very interesting! This seems to be one of the "professional" cameras which the various eBay sellers mention when they are selling USB2.0 cameras that cannot capture full resolution over USB. It seems they can't figure out how to separate the Live View streaming from the image downloading, even though Canon was able to do that more than 10 years ago. But anyway, the "Live Stitching" function looks very interesting, and if it works well it would save quite a bit of work. The one thing I worry about is that it seems to work directly from the video feed, so the resolution is likely limited to 1920x1080 for each frame. There may be higher resolution cameras available, but even 4k is a reduced resolution vs the still frame capabilities of many of these cameras.

It also looks like their example is showing a bit of distortion in the stitched image. This could be some sort of cumulative error that happens as the slide is panned. I've personally had very poor luck with stitching programs causing distortion. So far the only one I seem to be able to use without causing entire frames to be distorted is ICE, and even with it the local alignment areas have to be kept to a minimum. I worry that live stitching could be very problematic for distortion if it is allowed to scale the image on-the-fly.