Highway Robbery???

Hi all,

I am in the process of assembling the final pieces of my new S&S DX-D200 rig and am simply "astounded" at the cost of what I had thought to be simple and inexpensive items. I am talking about the manual focus gears for the 60 and 105mm macro lenses and the zoom gear for the 24-24 mm zoom lens. When told that the cost was going to be in excess of $150 I thought that this was going to be for all 3 gears - WRONG! I should've known better. After all, this is one of the more expensive hobbies I've got. (Well, I guess that power boating and Harleys are up there as well...).

Sorry for venting, but I simply cannot get over the cost of these "stupid little plastic rings". Where does the bleeding stop? Oh wait....there is the next trip to an exotic location to think about...

GG

I bet if you were REALLY handy you could make some gears of your own, but it wouldn't be easy. Especially for the 60 and 105 which require that AF-MF shift collar...

I've made a few gears in the past in a pinch for specialty lenses. Heck, one of our sponsors even made a gear out of a sewing machine belt! :-)

Cheers

James

HI,

You should know that all hobbies are expensive it does not matter

what you choose to do in your spare time . Those retailers

know that we will pay lots & lots for our favourite pastime, but just

think of the pleasure it brings

Andy

:ph34r: :ph34r:

as expensive as these items may seem, we have to remember that these are low volume products by any stretch of the imagination.

The tooling required to produce these sort of items is not cheap - what we pay for in the gears is the design and tooling costs, not the cost of the plastic itself.

Still, I take pride in how loud I can say "HOW MUCH????!!!"

Steve

People are forgetting a few key points,

Ok then - Steve Jones did get one of them

Specialist Manufacturers are just that..... specialists...

I am an "underwater video specialist" - pretentious maybe, but I use this term as the world is flooded with UW "videographers" who seem to use nothing but their right thumb in their daily work. I refuse to be asscoiated with such nonsense... I call these folks "thumbs"......... (but that's for a different post, I guess.... )

When I / Paul Wags / Mike Veitch / Nick Hope, et all, charge X thousands of dollars for a wet assignment, are we over charging? No, we are supplying a niche service, of which their is very little serious competition in the global-market.

The same goes for these gears.....

Let me digress a little - also......

The conspiracist in me (don't worry I'm a realistic conspiracist, not a nutter - Diana did die, Osama did attack the US etc........ I just enjoy hearing the theories that wildely fly around.....) also belives that niche manufacturers know that if you NEED something, they can charge top dollar for it, fact...

Is a climbing rope / harness REALLY worth the money one has to spend on them? SURE! You need them as they save your life...... Full stop...... Materially and R&D-wise they are probably worth a tenth of the cost one needs to pay for them..... The same goes for your regulator, BC etc.... (I know a BC doesn't save your life, but it certainly makes it easier!)

Like Steve pointed out. If you make a product, of which you will only sell a few items, then you need to divide the development costs by the number of expected items to be sold in the market. Add a little (maybe a lot in the case of certain manufacturers) and you will have your RRP.....

Simply put, Why do we all pay 150%+ of the cost of our imaging equipment for our underwater housings (discounting Ikelite)? Because you need it to ensure that the REALLY expensive piece of equipment that gathers the images doesn't die, as it obviously would, were one to immerse it water and try using it........... (sorry to point out the obvious, but I do that sometimes.....)

Another example - The first couple of years of Plasma TVs saw a price which was totally unrealistic. Why? Because 9 out of 10 of the TVs which hit the end of the production line wouldn't actually work! The customer had to absorb this cost....... They've now - supposedly - got it down to an approximate 30% failure rate....

As usual, I could go on for hours but I've got work to do, and you lot are probably rubbing your sore eys and scratching your aching heads wondering how this guy can type so much without getting repetative strain injury?!?!?

So to sum up this post -

1. You need the part so pay the price.....

2. They won't be selling alot of them, so help them feed their families and support their efforts......

3. As Steve says, the tooling machines and therefore the machining process itself IS pretty damned expensive.......

Don't get me wrong, I agree that niche products are VASTLY over-priced....... but there we go.

If no-one bought them, they'd drop their prices.

At the end of the day, blame the dudes years ago who said "OK, I'll pay well over the odds" and therefore set the market price at that level. Not the manufacturer.

Cheers for your extended time.......

Chris

Chris,

You are "so on the money", and yet I still feel much better now. Or as Steve put it "Still, I take pride in how loud I can say "HOW MUCH????!!!"

GG

First rule of Business – Charge what the market will bear. If you can get someone to buy a widget for $100.00, why sell it to him for $15.00?

you lot are probably rubbing your sore eys and scratching your aching heads wondering how this guy can type so much without getting repetative strain injury?!?!?

Actually, I thought you must be using voice dictation software like Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Why buy a camera with AF as good as the D200 and worry about manual focus gears? I take the odd image underwater and don't own a single manual focus gear for any of my lenses.

Alex

Two wonderful pointers - Poliwog, I hadn;t thought of that! Thank you so much for reminding me about those types of software........ It'll save my hands, wrists, back and eyes a hell of a lot of work...... Unfortunately, though, I reckon that it'd also encourage me to go on faaaaaaaar longer than I already have want to do in the posts.... I'll save you all the pain and stick to banging buttons on the keyboard..... until repetative strain injury takes its toll and then I may consider a cross-over....

Dr. Mustard. A fantastic previously unconsidered point about the D200 and its focusing abilities...... never thought of it, well pointed out......

Maybe there's your answer, gengiant? Another thing to ponder, how much will a focusing light set you back for all of the little critters which are hiding in darker areas? I reckon very little for a very crappy little torch which you can fix on somewhere and which the strobes will then overpower as they fire....

In fact. Don't many strobes in the market come with a built in pilot light already? (This is for my own future research as opposed to posing a rhetorical question......)

Chris

Some years ago an engineer (who runs a climbing equipment manufacturing company) looked at an aperture gear from a well-known housing manufacturer. He commented that whilst the material cost was a few pence, the tooling set-up would have been very, very expensive indeed.

I think that the point is that you can buy mass produced stuff at ludicrously low prices (depending upon where it is sourced), but if you want to buy low volume, precision built items from manufacturers who are in themselves pretty specialised, then you are going to have to pay an appropriate price - which reflects their inherent production cost.

I'd agree with Alex though and I can think of few times when I'd fit a focus gear these days.

Why am I suddenly Dr M?

I think Alex, or someless even less complimentary, is more appropriate here on Wetpixel!

On a serious point - I believe that the daylight robbery is more the dealer who will tell you that you must have manual focus gears on a camera like the D200 - rather than the price themselves.

Alex

Sorry, Alex, didn't want to cause any offense....

Merely that I have the utmost respect for Doctors who have put in the effort and hard work to earn their titles.... Must be something to do with my Britishness

As we haven't personaly met, yet, I thought that it would be good and proper to address you by your correct status.....

I presume that I can call you / refer to you as Alex from now on?

Again, hope that you weren't offended in any way....

Cheers

Chris

If it helps give some perspective on low-volume parts manufacturing, check out the link below. You can download their design software and they'll produce what you draw. Just for fun, measure up a zoom or focus ring and draw it out using the simple CAD-style template for gears. Price it. One-off products (and even hundred-off products) can be expensive. I've had great ideas for strobe arm components and asked ULCS to make them and they haven't because they have a minimum requirement to produce something. Even T-shirt printers charge a set-up charge! Sometimes I wish I could craft these things myself but then I think about how much I would have to pay for a all the equipment to set up a machine shop in my basement (and remember that at the moment, I still have ten fingers) and I suck it up and buy the parts.

http://www.emachineshop.com/

Mike

Has anyone looked into rapid prototyping? I would think that these could be made rather cheaply even one off, assuming you were willing to do the design work.

If no-one bought them, they'd drop their prices.

I think just the opposite ... if nobody bought them, they wouldn't make them ...

Why am I suddenly Dr M?

I think Alex, or someless even less complimentary, is more appropriate here on Wetpixel!

 

On a serious point - I believe that the daylight robbery is more the dealer who will tell you that you must have manual focus gears on a camera like the D200 - rather than the price themselves.

 

Alex

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thanks all and to you Alex for pointing out what might be obvious for the experienced digital photogs amongst you. This D200 (and digital photography as a whole) is pretty darn new to me, so I've been relying on much advice from others to date. I think I will have a discussion with the dealer as to the need for the MF gears. In his defense,he's been pretty trustworthy in the past. Maybe he's just not very knowledgable about the D200?

As to my personal experience with manual versus auto focus, it is based on a single dive with a borrowed D100 a couple of years ago. It seemed to "hunt" an awful lot in auto-focus mode, given the lack of contrast often found under water. Maybe the D200 is indeed superior to the point of not wanting to use the MF ability. And based on my experience shooting film with a manually focusing camera I've gotten so accustomed to fixing my macro-focus distance to what I wanted to shoot before I'd even move in on the subject. Then, when I would move in, I'd hit the shutter as soon as I saw (what I believed to be) perfect focus. I'd repeat that step several times (depending on how still I could hold the camera), especially given the VERY limited depth of field I'd usually have available. So, in short, based on everyone's collective wisdom on this list, will the D200 allow me to change my M.O. of shooting macro? Will I truly be spoiled by its auto-focus abilities? Or do you find yourself using your focus-lock functions to nail the macro shots?

Thanks again!

GG

Canuck

Yesterday, 03:32 AM [ Post #15 ]

 

I think just the opposite ... if nobody bought them, they wouldn't make them ...

Sorry Canuck (John), you misunderstand me -

If no-one bought them - AFTER the production of maybe 500 parts, then - they'd drop their prices.................

...and never make them again.

Manual Focus Gears

I consider manual focus gears absolutely vital and try to make them for every lens I use underwater. Especially the wide-angle lenses. And of course, the macro lenses.

A few years ago I bought several long rods of delrin plastic and had a gear machining shop put teeth in the rods that matched those of my SeaCam lens gears. Now I just have a machinist cut off a small length of the rod and bond it to a metal sleve I've had made to fit the lens and make all my own zoom and manual focus gears. Generally ends up costing about the same as those from SeaCam. But they work so much smoother. And I can have a gear made when I buy a new lens, not when and if SeaCam finally gets around to making one. Or a very smooth set of gears for a particular lens, like the 3 gear set necessary for the 70-180 Micro-nikkor - zoom, AF-M switch, and manual Focus.

In fact during a conversation with Harald at the last DEMA, he told me that virtually no one had ordered any manual focus gear when buying one of the newer digital underwater housing. So why should he bother. And from his standpoint, the economic one, why sould he.

I just looked at and briefly topside tested a new Nikon 105mm AFS VR Micro-nikkor lens. I didn't buy it because the one I tested didn't peform any better optically than my old 105 at 1:1, and 2:1, with extension tubes, which is how I use the 105 most. And by my measurements, it would be possible to make a manual focus gear that cleared all the AF & VR switches in the SeaCam port system. But not easy. And if I had felt the lens performed well enough to buy one, I would be working with my machine shop guy to build the manual focus gear the moment I got one for myself. Guess I'll have to wait for a Zeiss macro lens in the Nikon mount. Maybe they'll introduce it at Photokina. See www.robgalbraith.com and twenty questions to Zeiss about their manual focus lenses for Nikon for more on this subject.

Back to WHY manual focus. I often find the using an auto-focus point, particularly the one at the very center of the picture area, results in less sharper edge detail than if you focus manually watching the edge sharpness carefully. This helps because the focus plane of a rectilinear wide-angle lens is exactly parallel to the film (or sensor) plane. And the edge of that focus plane is actually at a greater distance, about 1.4x, than the center. Using a wide-angle behind a dome port creates havoc with this plane of focus because the virtual image you are focusing on is a curve, parallel to the curve of the dome port, a part of a sphere, at any given distance. And at exactly the same distance from the lens for any given real distance, but much closer. So you end up trying to impose a flat focus plane onto a curved subject plane. Which is the biggest reason why underwater wide-angle, especially extreme WA, pictures often have very noticable soft edges. This is far more of a factor in the edge unsharpness than imperfect alignment of the nodal point of the lens to the hemisphere center of the dome.

If you want to see this for youself. Go in a swimming pool with a clearly patterned bottom. Focus at a point a foot or two from the housing at the center of the picture area. Shoot a picture with the lens aperture wide open. If you examine the picture closely, you will see that the further you move towards the edge of the picture, the further away the sharpest rendition of the pool bottom is. In essence, the focus plane becomes a curve also, with its nearest point dead center and all other focus points further and further away as you move outward from the center of the picture.

By manually focusing a bit out toward the edge, you can "pick" the point where the flat focus plane and curved subject plane coincide. And depending on the aperture you can shoot at, then use depth-of-field to gain much better overall sharpness that if you simply auto-focused on the subject. Using an outward AF point in the picture can help, but is less precise that simply using manual focus.

Another reason for using manual focus is that sometimes the point of the subject you want sharpest, like the eye, does not have enough contrast for an AF system to lock on to well. Eyes are often camouflaged. And you may not want to move the camera to aim at a better AF target and then move it back again recompose for the framing you want. This can disturb a wary critter. Again, manual focus can let you put the focus right where you want it without moving anything. At least it can if your camera housing has a good enough viewfinder so that you can accurately see the focus point.

Still a third reason for manual focus is that you want to try shooting things larger that lifesize. And prefer to do it using only extension rings. Or a combination of extension rings and teleconverters. Which results in a maximum aperture smaller than f5.6, whereup the AF system doesn't work well. I have shot at a magnification as high as 4.4x on film using a Nikon 2x teleconverter, and then 92mm or kenko extension tubes, between the camera body and the 105mm Micro-nikkor. This gives me a maximum aperture of about f11, for which I also need a focusing light. No hope with any auto-focus system. Once again, manual focus to the rescue.

Those are the reasons why I consider manual focus gears so important.

divegypsy

anthp Posted Yesterday, 10:17 AM

  ...and never make them again.

..................................B)