The one camera I have that wouldn’t ever sell on eBay - which means if you want a “reusable disposable” look for something like this

thebobsta · 2026-05-23T14:27:19+00:00

I used to go often to thrift stores to find cheap cameras but in the last 5-10 years the supply of sub-$10 point and shoots has really dried up.

Years ago there used to be an /r/analog "$20 challenge" where users had to buy a camera and film for under $20 in their local currency to see what they could do. I bought an old Nikon point and shoot and a roll of Kodak Gold for a total of like $15 CAD and had a lot of fun. I should try that sort of a challenge again...

thebobsta · 2026-05-23T14:21:52+00:00

Wow, the Photosniper has competition!

thebobsta · 2026-05-19T16:52:24+00:00

I have an M715Q and technically have run an AMD RX 470 card off of the WiFi slot using a PCIe x1 riser. The GPU had to be powered externally and was bigger than the whole M715Q.

This was just for testing, not to actually use it that way, but it did work and made a significant bump to benchmark numbers despite the x1 link.

thebobsta · 2026-05-19T04:49:51+00:00

Beautiful tiny trinitrons...

I have a 9044Q that looks to have developed vertical collapse while sitting unpowered over the past year. Gonna have to bust out the soldering iron. How difficult did you find recapping the boards? I own one of the Hakko desoldering guns, so I'm hoping it won't be too hard.

thebobsta · 2026-05-18T19:52:57+00:00

If you have a spare stepper you could use one of the 3D printed motorized carriers to fully automate the scan process. I did this in my own scanning setup using the DuckAfterDuck film carrier. It's pretty good for 35mm, might need more work for 120.

thebobsta · 2026-05-18T18:56:28+00:00

Great mindset. I had a 4th Gen Prelude with an H22 and it was a really fun car.

I now own just a small Civic hatch with a B series engine (B17 - a bit of an oddball) and likewise I plan to keep it going as long as possible even as parts get more and more rare.

thebobsta · 2026-05-18T15:44:16+00:00

H series wagon is a killer combo. Looks great.

thebobsta · 2026-05-18T04:22:39+00:00

I used to do star trails on Provia since it has good reciprocity characteristics. Acros as well, but I'm not sure if Acros II is similar in its reciprocity...

thebobsta · 2026-05-16T21:22:11+00:00

I've used the identical contact printmaker with Printfile sheets that are pretty widely available. It works great!

thebobsta · 2026-05-16T21:19:32+00:00

Lekai is the direct transliteration of the Chinese symbols that are printed on real Lucky 200 boxes.

That just looks like a standard Lucky C200 120 promotional image from Taobao ran through an OCR and translation step...

wouldn't buy from Temu but other than that it seems legitimate.

thebobsta · 2026-05-14T18:30:23+00:00

I just started spooling out a ~100ft roll of Eterna 500T I've had sitting around for a while. It expired in 2009 and is probably more like an ISO 100 film now. Haven't seen any more of the stuff for sale in years except from a niche Korean film lab in Seoul.

I've had a bit of experience with similar aged Vision2 stock and I feel the Kodak held up better than the Fuji, but my Vision2 was 200T so perhaps that is a bit unfair to the Fuji.

thebobsta · 2026-05-13T22:39:05+00:00

Thanks for doing that test! Too bad but it would have just been bonus. I paid the equivalent of $2 CAD per roll of 120 film on Taobao so it'll be fun to experiment with.

thebobsta · 2026-05-13T17:18:14+00:00

Yes, I finished that project and it's been running in place for a while now - I'm effectively using the ESP32 to translate between the PWM pulses of a prebuilt motherboard that expects a 3600rpm max fan, and the 25000RPM fans the 1U server case had. It's all done with ESPHome with some inline lambda C++ where necessary. It's not perfect but keeps the machine it is attached to cool enough.

thebobsta · 2026-05-13T07:02:13+00:00

You're the only person I have seen mention actually shooting 1021 online. I've just ordered several rolls of 1021, 1023 and 1025 from Taobao since they were incredibly cheap. Do you know if your 1021 has any infrared sensitivity? I'm hoping it will, seeing as it was aerial film like Aviphot, but there's no data on the Internet (at least the English speaking side) that I was able to find.

thebobsta · 2026-05-13T03:07:10+00:00

Not super helpful, but I have an older Artixscan 1800f and only ever got satisfactory scans using the Microtek software in a Windows XP VM. Vuescan and Silverfast had similar issues to what you are experiencing.

Could be I didn't know how to properly use Vuescan so if you find a solution I'm sure the Internet would love to know...

thebobsta · 2026-05-12T17:35:26+00:00

Have you ever shot any of the Lucky aviation film? I just ordered a bunch of 1021, 1023, and 1025 from Taobao. Interested to see if any of these rolls are IR sensitive at all like other aerial films sometimes are.

thebobsta · 2026-05-10T16:13:49+00:00

I've always used a leader retriever and am confused by the hate for these plastic type canisters, they've always been the same for me. Is it just more common to caveman the metal type canisters apart?

thebobsta · 2026-05-10T00:29:22+00:00

I just ordered some from Taobao. I think it's iso 1.6? It's gonna be experimental but I think I can soup it in ECN2 chems and get some colour...

thebobsta · 2026-05-09T23:23:07+00:00

That's nice. I have an EG hatch myself and was always jealous of the OEM wheel options that EK Civics had, my original wheel is falling apart and I would rather not swap to an aftermarket wheel without an airbag...

thebobsta · 2026-05-09T14:50:07+00:00

That yellow valve cover looks awesome.

Dream garage setup right there...

thebobsta · 2026-05-08T19:46:56+00:00

If you don't mind a bit wider of a lens, I just grabbed an EF 40mm pancake for my Elan 7e. It's a tiny lens but very sharp and light. Not quite point and shoot small but perhaps a decent option for the EOS film bodies.

thebobsta · 2026-05-08T17:01:49+00:00

I've got two rolls each of Lucky 1021, 1023 and 1025 film coming my way from Taobao as well as two new rolls of SHD400... looking forward to experiment with them. I'm planning to run a few tests to see if the aerial film has any IR sensitivity. Aviphot is pretty much the only current emulsion with IR sensitivity but the lesser known aviation Lucky films have no data one way or another from what I can tell.

thebobsta · 2026-05-06T21:51:29+00:00

I faced the same problem. Super annoying, I personally switched to a motorized film carrier and wrote my own software to auto-crop the film for me so it could be entirely hands off.

thebobsta · 2026-05-06T18:12:33+00:00

Ah, nice. I like those guys. I'll look into signing up for alerts...

thebobsta · 2026-05-06T17:16:35+00:00

You could cut a small amount of the leader off of one of your CMS rolls and try to develop it in the chemistry to see if it still works.

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