[Elphel-support] Motorized zoom lens

[support-list]

Hello Mike,

It should be possible to connect lens that has some digital control where you can use RS232 or USB, available in the camera. There could be some COTS adapters to use regular motorized lenses, but I'm not aware of any particular. We did plan to make such adapter ourselves, until realized that it will not be that useful.

Iris
When using a small pixel sensor diffraction limits the highest aperture setting (it is a ratio of the pixel size and the wavelength). With the 2.2um pixels in the 5MPix sensor we use now, this maximal value is ~3.5, for the modern sesnors with 1.4 um (we will use them with the new camera I'm working on now) this goes to maximal F#=2.0, so iris can be fixed. And with ERS (rolling shutter) exposure control is perfect, so motorized iris would not add much even if diffraction was not a problem.

Focus
Small format sensors have very wide depth of field, so for many applications even the focus can be fixed.

Zoom

That limits number of useful motorized controls to just one - zoom, but here is another problem. The quality of lenses lags behind the resolution of the sensors, and it is more difficult to make otherwise the same performance zoom lens than the fixed one. So instead of controlling zoom I would rather try to use several sensors with fixed lenses and switch between them (i.e. using our 10359 board).

Andrey