New feature up at riocar.org...

http://www.riocar.org/lens.php

Also linked from the main menu at www.riocar.org .

Heading off any of the obvious questions:

- It only shows two on the screen at a time because I wanted it to take up less screen real-estate. Originally, I wanted to do just one, but Tom suggested that someone might want to do side-by side comparisons. Having four up at a time was just too huge, and it did not cover all the possible combinations. So the perfect compromise is to show two and let you pick any two to compare.

- Each time you click on a link, it should switch which picture it updates. So you will always be comparing the last two faces you clicked on (this should be obvious after playing with it for a moment, but I thought I should mention that here). Tom wrote the Javascript to do that (thanks, Tom).

- If the pics aren't showing up immediately, just wait for them to load. Might take a little while on dialup. If you're on Nutscape and are having trouble after resizing the window, just press the "reload" button and wait for the pics to come down.

- No, I will not be photographing any OTHER lighting conditions other than the three already listed. It was a complete pain in the ass just to get those done. It's more work than it looks like, trust me.

- If DarkStorm wants to send me a Smoke faceplate to photograph, I will include it in the lineup along with a link to order it.

- The short exposure time of the "sun" pictures shows up the flickering/wavering nature of the VFD refresh frequency. Instead of a gray line, you see a dotted line. This is because of the time-dither needed to produce the gray line combined with the short exposure time of the camera. Also, you will see that in the fullsun pics, the display has some areas that are dimmer than others. This is also due to the short exposure time, the display is of course uniformly bright instead of bands of bright/dim as pictured. But you get the idea.

Excellent work.

I look forward to any darkstorm comparisons that might occur ... hopefully he'll be a little generous to these hints ;-)

g

Very nice. I'd be interested in seeing what people think about the accuracy of the colors. For me the blue is pretty good, though perhaps a little greener on my players than the picture. The green is way off for me, on the player it is leaning towards a pea green color and darker and is, frankly, not as pretty as the picture. I haven't tried the amber or red yet, probably never well.

I have two green lenses, and they each do have a slightly different tint.

It's stated at the bottom of the page that there is manufacturing variance.

Also, the color definition of your PC monitor may not exactly match the color definition of my digital camera.

Ambient light hue also significantly alters perceptions of color.

I cannot account for all of those variables. In fact, sitting here on my desk playing, the color of my player seems slightly different than what's pictured on the PC monitor. It's close, but not exactly.

I won't be using a colorimeter any time soon, so don't ask.

> I cannot account for all of those variables.

Yeah, I know, I'm not knocking it, just curious what the variation is going to be for different people.

> I won't be using a colorimeter any time soon, so don't ask.

Considering that I have never heard of that before now, I think you were safe.

You'd be surprised how close I've come to buying a colorimeter. To calibrate the grayscales properly on my projection television, you need one of them. I've been doing it by trial-and-error, and I think I've got a decent white balance and grayscale on my set, but it took a lot of futzing over a long period of time. Kind of like adjusting your EQ in the car, you have to make small tweaks and live with them for a while.

well, i know it isn't perfect, but usually if you have a set of color bars coming from a dvd you can get a pretty good setting.

THanks for the faceplates pics.. obviously none of them handle direct sun well

Trust me, setting the grayscales and white balance on a projection television is much more than looking at a standard set of color bars (although that is part of it). And it's more than twiddling the Tint and Color controls. There's a whole level of science to the thing that you've probably never seen.

Hmmm. why is the time displayed on that song exactly on 4:47 for every pic? Did you really move it to that time for each one, or was each pic "photoshopped"?

Look again. The time index is 0:00 and the song length is 4:47.

Rob

I have two green lenses, and they each do have a slightly different tint.

Like you say, the blue lenses vary more -- I've usually got 4 empegs on my desk at work (a mk1, a pair of mk2s and a mk2a). They're all different colours. I suspect that at least one of them doesn't have the AR coating, though.

I might take a picture at some point -- one of the empegs is at home today.

It would be nice to put up some Darkstorm lenses as well.

Calvin

Yes, I said that.