Hey Everybody
I heard about tips with Nivea creme put on GG of many lens adapters.
Results are : clean image, more light and degrain (with less light lenses)
Is it true??
Anyone tried it with Letus GG???
What the effect was with Letus???
Regards

I seem to recall that the builder who used Nivea cream on a groundglass moved on to making finer groundglasses and finessing his adaptor without resort to Nivea cream.

I suggest you contact Quyen Le to see what damage might be done to his groundglass.

It could work, but what about too much diffusing collateral effect?

The obvious advantage to this method is that your camera will smell nicer.

Sorry guys, couldn't resist. ;-)

-gb-

Thanks for your comments. I modified my Letus myself (without nivea creme) two day ago. In my opinion it works better now. There is more light and i can see more area in the image.
Regards.

Tomasz: Seems like you would get more of a hotspot with this. I'm familiar with Nivea but not sure exactly how it looks, so maybe it does work better than, say, vaseline or similar smeared on the glass.

What did you do to mod the letus? Any details, pics?

Thanks for your comments. I modified my Letus myself (without nivea creme) two day ago. In my opinion it works better now. There is more light and i can see more area in the image.
Regards.

I bought the Letus adaptor a few weeks ago and use it with a JVC HD 100U. While it looks very good in outdoor conditions (5600K) I have a problem getting enough light for interior shooting. I am using a Nikon 50mm f1.8 with both the adaptor iris and the lens apeture wide open. Has anyone else experienced this issue?

I removed the MIRRORS PART from my letus HD100. Now I'm working on JVC HD200 so I can easily flip my image from the camera settings and record image uprigth:). I connected both, remaining parts(mount to the camera and lens mount)with the tube in length 19cm. And today was the last, most important modification. On my own risk i decided to put the nivea creme on Ground Glass (matte side).
The results are :
- less light loss,
- wide images (50mm = 50mm etc.), almost all magifications removed:)
- nivea creme = cleaner picture and more transparent GG
- now i can use fast shutter speeds without dirts in the image (from 120-500 per sec. but tested with lenses with light 1.2, 1.4)
- unfortunately bigger size of my adapter, but i am not crying about it:)
My first test video with modified LetusHD100 is here :
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=92925 (but it was shoot before i used Nivea on GG)
Maybe tomorrow I'll put some pictures of my new letus version.

Greetings

Thank you for the information!

Which of the modifications to you credit with the gain in light?

All the cream is doing is filling in the deeper pits of the ground glass (they tend to cause the darker specks of grain) and decreasing it's effective diffusion.

This should only be done if you are experiencing too much light loss (be fair to the adapter, 1.5 stop light loss is not excessive) or if you can't zoom in enough past any vignetting you might have. Bokeh rendition and the effective depth of field will all decrease with the application of the cream.

Ben, I used nivea creme on my own risk. I put it on GG (matte side).
My notes:
more light, clean picture (even in high speed shutter 1/120-1/250) and the same DOF.
Its only my personal opinion and i'm not recommend to anybody to do it yourself.
Regards

Hi, sorry in advance if my english could be poor...
The experiment of nivea creme is interesting.. but could give some imperfection in projection...however I will try on original Letus35flip GG
I tried to exchange original GG (i think a newton Glass, perhaps the costless and optically acceptable solution) with a component of an old 1,5" LCD from a broken digital camera. One of the backlight's layers is the best GG solutions (unfortunately plastic-made) that I tried, 'cause its surface gives a so irregular grain (most of times not very visible in good light conditions) to totally disappear with vibration mechanism on.
The only thing is that is very difficult to have this kind of material. Only disassembling old lcds (and maybe not every kind...)

lets see those pics :)

I have a huge chunk of that from a laptop LCD screen. Anyone want to buy it ;)

Tomasz,

can you post any picks of your adapter? I just had my dvx upgraded with the andromeda setup and the grain I get with my letus way too noticeable. Either I need to fix it or move on to a new adapter. What you did sounds really interesting to me. I've asked Queyen via email a few times about getting a new GG from him but have never heard back... anyone else out there been able to do this?

i asked him as well, he told me to send pictures of my motor, after that he never wrote back

Ettore Giraldi used nivea cream on his adapter (http://dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=64232) and managed to come up with some of the best 35mm footage I've ever seen (IMPO). I don't know exactly what was the process though. If these results could be achieved with the letus35 it would be a dream come true.

Good point Raphael... does anyone know how best to apply it to the GG? Doesnt look like any of his footage is still live. Also, is the GG cleanable?

Ben, I used nivea creme on my own risk. I put it on GG (matte side).
My notes:
more light, clean picture (even in high speed shutter 1/120-1/250) and the same DOF.
Its only my personal opinion and i'm not recommend to anybody to do it yourself.
Regards
This is what I mean by more diffusion:
http://www.richard-darge.com/CF1_3.mov

Watch how the CF-3 diffuser (more diffusion) has SHALLOWER DOF even though the lens is set at the same f-stop.

Nivea creme decreases diffusion and thus decreases effective DOF. It's a simple fact, if you're getting less lightloss you're getting less diffusion, and thus deeper DOF, and thus a less effective adapter.

Nivea creme decreases diffusion and thus decreases effective DOF. It's a simple fact, if you're getting less lightloss you're getting less diffusion, and thus deeper DOF, and thus a less effective adapter.

Actually, I like the sounds of that. I've been trying to deepen my DOF slightly with the Letus, the problem is I cant stop down hardly at all without losing too much light and getting nailed with major GG grain.