Hey,
I’m excited to announce that the Micro 43 sensors are officially ready and available to the public! A big thank you to everyone that has been providing feedback and supporting the project the past year. Moving this project up into larger sensors has always been a goal of mine and I feel like this is a first big step in that direction. Also, extra big thank you to Max Wendt for being an early tester for the sensor and helping me work out the implementation bugs!
So let’s get into a couple of brand new features that I’m excited about..
Flash
One of the biggest roadblocks of not having a mechanical shutter or global shutter has been syncing flash. Catching the flash was heavily dependent on perfect timing that I could never get right due to rolling shutter so I originally decided to put it off to another build. However, I decided to think outside the box and developed a way to capture flash in an unconventional way. Here’s how it works:
I created a new flash sync mode - when it’s enabled, it starts constantly recording live frames and waits for a flash to appear. Once it detects a flash, it finds the best evenly exposed frame and then writes it as an image. This effectively makes the flash the shutter instead of the shutter button.
I also built a wireless setup using a Godox wireless flash trigger where I wired up the camera grip to trigger the flash.
Here’s a video demo of it in action:
Monochrome Raw - from a colour sensor
As you are all aware, the imx 492 has a true monochrome sensor option and has all the benefits of a monochrome sensor like increased sharpness and low light performance. I was however very curious to see if I could create a monochrome raw image with the colour imx 294 sensor. Due to its quad bayer setup, I had way more green photosites to leverage when recompiling a 11mp monochrome raw image. This is similar to how the Pixii camera takes monochrome images.
Overall, I’m incredibly excited about the possibilities and potential with these new sensors! If you want to get your own, they are now available:
If you’re into the project, please consider sharing it to family and friends that may be interested!
Thank you again for all the support.
Cheers,
Malcolm
Ha - thanks for the shout out! It was an absolute privilege to get my hands on one of the M43 sensors early!
Hey man! I've been following the project for a while and I'm really happy to see how it turned out! Congrats on launching the Kickstarter campaign 🙂
I can’t make my mind up which one to get: 294 or 492 since I'm interested in both full-spectrum and monochrome photography. I was wondering if what you described as monochrome raw on 294 means simply converting a coloured raw to b/w or is there some way to take a "true" monochrome image somehow? Thanks for your hard work!