Hi guys, thank you. Sorry it took so long to do some testing but I was not feeling well...
My cam86 works well but there are few "things" I noticed. Initially I thought it had problems but I just spent 2h reading 50-ish pages on the Ukrainian forums and collecting notes and I believe I have found lots of answers. I have included the comments below as Brendan and Gary may have the same questions:
Note that all my tests were done without any cooling at ambient temperature of about 25C.
1. There is a strong vertical line on the left hand side. Actually there are other weaker vertical lines throughout the images. See attached image 1. On the Ukrainian forums it was noted that the vertical lines should go away once the sensor gets cooled. I am not sure about the big line. Pat, from memory you fixed this by using a larger capacitor C30=330uF, 6.3V. We have used 3x100uF ceramic capacitors so hopefully we are in the clear. If needed we could even boost this to 3x200uF ceramic (E14 has stock of those).
2. If you run the camera for a while you will notice that the standard deviation for the frames goes up. This is because the sensor warms up and the thermal noise goes up.
3. The 0ms exposure is not dark if there is any light shining on the sensor (image 2). I found this comment on the Ukrainian forum explaining what is going on:
Quote:
This occurs for the following reason. When any simple charge accumulates in the sensor.
The firmware provides cleansing it in the formation of the frame pulse SUB. The method works, but not completely. We need to do a single frame preview frame "empty" before shooting. then it is becoming normal. This also applies to other versions of the cameras.
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4. Every now and then the camera goes nuts and the reading takes 3.8 seconds instead of the usual 2 seconds. It will do this for several images and then go back to normal. See attached image 3.
There were few comments on the Ukrainian forums to change the USB cable, to check feet 8 of DD6, to make sure the CPU on the computer is not overloaded or to change the resistor R12.
My problem is likely my temporarily USB cable which has a large section of unshielded wires.
And my final image has been taken through hand-held Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D @f/5.6
