Messages

136

Canon General / Re: Canada Post is literally giving me an Ulcer - Ed Mika

« on: September 21, 2011, 07:49:25 AM »

Some good news finally, I just got word this morning that an adapter my wife mailed on the 7th of September arrived yesterday in Minnesota. Looking at the calendar it took 7 business days to arrive there.

137

Canon General / Re: Canada Post is literally giving me an Ulcer - Ed Mika

« on: September 20, 2011, 05:52:20 PM »

Thanks for continuing to be so understanding Harley.  I'll keep you in the loop on the TS 35 adapter, right now the machine shop we are dealing with for the other two adapters considers us really small potatoes and we barely get any machine time so making prototypes has been really hard to get started with them.  My father-in-law and I have recently decided to invest $10,000 (on credit cards) in a nice bench top Tormach vertical CNC mill that should be up and running around December 10th, at this time we will be able to develop our ideas within days instead of months.  The TS mock-up we machined from an FL 55 1.2 kit works great and will be a really nice Tilt shift solution for EF.  I've already sold my TS 24mm 3.5L II since I like the little metal 35mm so much more. 

dickb on fredmiranda also came up with a really amazing idea to help us with the problems we are having with the close proximity of some lens aperture levers to full frame body plastic near the electrical contacts.  We will be rotating the mounts on the EF-FD 0.75mm adapters 90 degrees counter clockwise and are exploring dropping the flange thickness to around .5mm to get even more focus distance out of all FD lenses.  An even more radical idea we are exploring is taking our gen2 no flange thickness concept http://flic.kr/p/7UyQph and making it work since the lever would not longer be an interference issue on full frame bodies.  We just have to come up with a locking mechanism within the EF body forcing the adapter to be mounted on the camera first.

Pretty interesting stuff being worked on.  I just hope people are still willing to buy EdMika after this shipping SNAFU.

138

Canon General / Canada Post is literally giving me an Ulcer - Ed Mika

« on: September 20, 2011, 05:08:46 PM »

I would like to solicit feedback from people who bought an adapter from me if and when they arrived.  We've been shipping internationally with Canada Post small packet air mail for about a year now with results being about a week to the US, 2 weeks to Europe, 3-4 weeks to Asia, Russia and Australia/NewZealand.  We have mailed out nearly 50 adapters since the canonrumors.com article was published on August 30th but I have heard of only one arriving anywhere yet.

Making matters worse, my chip supplier in Belarus sent 2x50 AF- confirmation chip shipments to me the same way as several times before that previously took about 6 days but now has taken over 20 days and waiting.  I ended the eBay listing after selling 14 adapters I could not yet ship when the chips continued to be delayed.  They still did not arrive today though according to tracking they passed out of customs in Montreal last Wednesday and are still sitting in Mississauga as of the weekend.

A friend of a friend works for Canada Post in Kitchener Ontario and he confirmed that since the postal strike was ended by the Government of Canada back to work legislation things have really slowed down and backlogs have built up with non priority mail.  He blames this on the lack of management approval for overtime but I feel most employees are unhappy with being forced back to work and probably are not giving it 100%.

I've talked with Craig who runs this website and his experience with Canada Post has been fine but he is shipping using the more expensive and tracked priority mail.  If I continue to use Canada Post going forward I will have to raise mailing prices to pay for this higher level shipping method.  Personally I'm so mad at Canada Post right now I'd happily go to Purolator or FedEX.

For those understandably frustrated buyers of my adapters still waiting for them to arrive please continue to be patient.  I will consider the adapters to be lost if they don't arrive to you after 4 weeks to North America and 5 weeks to everywhere else and at that time I will offer a full refund or will resend a new one probably using a different shipping service.

My sincerest apologies for this delay, we have photos taken at the post office of the front and back of each package we've sent out in all cases the same or next business day after your items were purchased.  you can email me at ebaydj@gmail.com if you would like me to send you the picture of your package to confirm your address and see the date it was sent to you.

Again, please comment on this thread if you are still waiting for your EdMika adapter to arrive, it would be helpful if you noted the date of purchase and the country you live in.  I'd especially like to hear from anyone who actually already got their adapters and when too.  Thanks-Ed Mika

139

Lenses / Re: New Article: Adapting your FD or FL lenses to EF/EOS

« on: September 20, 2011, 04:40:53 PM »

I'm not sure if a place like preview would be interested in doing a review on vintage gear adapted to work on modern cameras.  If they were I'd happily donate the adapters and/or lend the lenses for testing.  Plenty of people thus far feel it was worth the unproven risk that their good old lenses really were good and would remain so on EOS.

140

EOS Bodies / Re: overnight flight next to Canon engineer...

« on: September 07, 2011, 12:43:41 AM »

Really interesting stuff, thanks for sharing the good insight.  The video part makes me sad, the sensor part happy.

141

Lenses / Re: New Article: Adapting your FD or FL lenses to EF/EOS

« on: September 06, 2011, 09:12:20 PM »

I would imagine that adapting a good telescope would be just as good as the 800mm with 2x & 1.4x extenders.  (I would be looking to do Astrophotography and would need huge lenses...)  It might be a problem carrying that into sporting events, but more and more places are having problems with a 5DM2 or any DSLR...

I've been comparing the moon shots I've been doing to other people's on flickr since my first FD 600 4.5 (later my pair of FD 800 5.6L's) was made EOS compatible by one of my glued and grinded prototype designs in early 2010.  I found it has to be a pretty high end telescope setup typically on a motorized mount with often hundreds of computer stacked images to compete or beat the detail I can resolve from the moon in a single shot.  The old glass can certainly compete. -Ed Mika http://www.flickr.com/photos/ontarian/sets/72157623399415227/

142

Lenses / Re: New Article: Adapting your FD or FL lenses to EF/EOS

« on: September 06, 2011, 01:09:07 AM »

Yes on the nFD 85mm 1.2L but it will be a challenge to find something easy for the end user to install safely.  I predict it will take us a while but there has been a lot of interest. 

143

Lenses / Re: Using EF-S lens on FF body???

« on: September 04, 2011, 05:38:02 PM »

The EF 14mm 2.8 II we traded our 7D and 2x ii extender for a few weeks ago is doing the trick for us.  I'm currently trying the 8-15 fisheye for a few weeks to see how I like it but I have a feeling that my 300 dollar Optex 6.5 fisheye will be hard to justify upgrading from.

144

Lenses / Re: Using EF-S lens on FF body???

« on: September 04, 2011, 01:52:34 PM »

EF-S on FF sounds cheap and not very smart  APS-H is a better reason for such discussion.
IMHO, Canon should have made 1D bodies compatible with EF-S lenses, because now they are selling a pro body that can't shoot UWA with OEM lenses. 14mm x1.3 ~ 18mm, 16mm x1.3 ~ 21mm.
Big mistake, Canon.

The 1D bodies weren't made for shooting UWA; they're for shooting action/wildlife at tele and super-telephoto focal lengths, hence the 1.3x crop and higher frame rates.  A pro or serious amateur who needs to shoot UWA, is going to use one of the full frame (1Ds or 5D) bodies.

That may be true from Canons perspective but after getting addicted to the 1D interface I don't want to go back to a small body and can't afford/justify a 1DS so we run a pair of 1D4s.  I'm an (arguably) serious amateur and sometimes I like to shoot wide and theres the rub.

145

Lenses / Re: Using EF-S lens on FF body???

« on: September 04, 2011, 12:23:15 PM »

EF-S on FF sounds cheap and not very smart  APS-H is a better reason for such discussion.
IMHO, Canon should have made 1D bodies compatible with EF-S lenses, because now they are selling a pro body that can't shoot UWA with OEM lenses. 14mm x1.3 ~ 18mm, 16mm x1.3 ~ 21mm.
Big mistake, Canon.

Problem is 1D bodies have full frame mirrors so even if the EF-S image circle is ok enough for 1.3 crop, the -S(short throw back distance) causes mirror interference.

146

Lenses / Re: Using EF-S lens on FF body???

« on: September 04, 2011, 11:59:04 AM »

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ontarian/4561467724/
Here is how I did the 10-22 on my 1D3 a few years back.  Great mod and I kept the mirror from hitting by putting a foam sticker inside the uv filter to stop the movement below 12mm, worked like a charm.  -Ed Mika

147

Lenses / Re: New Article: Adapting your FD or FL lenses to EF/EOS

« on: September 03, 2011, 11:25:49 PM »

The FD lenses would have been more appealing if I had been into photography before the Micro 4/3 cameras came out - prices have already skyrocketed.

And for my purposes - FD lenses seem nice but the MTF charts are not totally convincing on most of them.

And finally - not to take anything away from the ingenuity of my friends to the north, but various people have manually been converting FD lenses to EOS by replacing the mount in the past.  Sometimes it's just replacing a single piece of metal that's needed.

I agree on the lens prices rising, the EVIL bodies are getting better and they are taking some of the bargain out of the cost equation but they are no DSLR replacement, at least not yet.  As for our outfit being original or not, I don't think we claim to be, what we hope to bring to the table is a do it yourself + keep the lens original philosophy mix that the market has not yet successfully filled. 

We had a day long development session today and some of the ideas we came up with are going to be seen as pretty wicked stuff by most people I wager to say.  If you find a fair deal on a TS 35 2.8 you may want to snap it up since a 100% EOS body compatible reversible do-it-yourself adapter kit is now beyond concept stage.  Much earlier in development but promising are a couple of ideas we have for an FD 400mm 2.8 L EOS kit, both radical departures from the standard complicated rear mount tear up and rebuild.  One of which would really put us on the map if we pulled it off. 

Sad news for some though, We've done full tear downs of FL 58 1.2 and FD 55 1.2 SSC lenses and there really is no viable do-it-yourself and reversible EOS solution so we'll leave those two lens design to the mirroless (hopefully) and mount hacker crowds.

Stay tuned -  Ed Mika

148

Canada / Re: Adorama shipping to Canada

« on: August 28, 2011, 08:47:25 PM »

I'm impressed with Adorama for replying to a forum post but I agree with many Canadians here that UPS sucks.  USPS or purolator is the way to go to bypass the brokerage fee troubles.  I've personally never had an issue with USPS shipping to Canada.

149

EOS Bodies / Re: 1d Mkiii vs 7d... I know, I know

« on: February 17, 2011, 08:31:41 PM »

I had a 7D, then for a second body I bought a 1D3, then I bought a 1D4 and sold the 7D.  The 1D4 was better than the 1D3 in every way so I traded the 1D3 for a 7D (and the other guy gave me an extra 500 bucks) again to get a lighter second body and more reach for telephoto shots and video.

If it was down to 1 body Id have the 1D3 over the 7D.  The 1D shooting experience is so much better as is the high iso performance to my eyes.

for one camera no cost limits I'd get the 1D4 over the 1D3s or 5D2.  I like the extra reach, the shooting speed and the still breathtaking high iso performance.