In DPreview, in the Nikon DSLR forum there is a link to a picture of a alleged new Digtial Nikonos. It might be a great idea if well but it looks designed like a photoshop hoax to me. See my comments there.

If it's true a good many peoples dreams would have come true and the lobbying will have paid off.
However, I might question the suitabilty of the lenses and the weird and wonderful effects a small chip would have upon them.

The picture looks like a 4a with an RS grip!

I agree, but look at the nice touches. There is an autofocus button on the front and the 28 mm lens is not the standard one. It only has the aperture dial and says autofocus nikkor on it. The serial # looks suspiciously high though.

Why does it have an aperture control on the top right side of the camera body, and an aperture control on the lens itself ??? If you're going to reengineer a lens for autofocus, why leave an aperture control when the lens is destined to be used only on a body with electronic aperture control :ph34r:.

There are several places where this photoshop mock up fails. The textured area on the left of the camera body is inconsistently lit, the viewfinder front element and surrounding bezel are obviously old and show wear. You can see a Gaussian noise addition around the word "Digital", attempting to mimic the texture of the remainder of the body. There's an alpha channel artifact around the F P dial on the viewfinder...

A reasonably well carried off photoshop hoax, but boy, what a concept. I know I'd buy it...

HOAX! HOAX! HOAX!

I would be a bit more believable if I didn't already know that Nikon is retreating rapidly from underwater photography. The beginning was in the early 1990s when the RS flopped so badly.

We can dream, but for the foreseeable future, housed DSLRs are the way to go for serious U/W photography.

If you check this out a little further, the photo is posted in some fellow's online gallery:

Bobby Handal | profile | all galleries >> digital dream


It would have been a great April Fool's Day post!

Nikon, are you listening?????

Hurry up.

The only real system of digital Amphibious jobbies would I think have to be based around the RS, but would have to be significantly cheaper too, to augment sales. Maybe around $3000 for the body & 28mm lens.

Who knows, they really might do it!

I think a digital RS could be very exciting. Hope they would fix the bouyancy though. I know a hardcore RS fan and he looks a little like Popeye.

Without all the mechanical stuff it would be significantly lighter. It would also be less prone to flooding with only 2 access's for batteries and cards/MD's. The view finder of the RS knocks the crap out of any housed camera! :freak:

Unless you're a photographer and don't require all that help of course!

As a former RS owner and nowadays (and resultantly) VERY anti-Nikon photographer, let me add my 2 cents worth.

Until such time as Nikon actually acknowledges that there are customers out there, until they actually take heed of those customers (none of which took place during the development of the RS - it is seriously technically flawed quite apart from the weight) I, for one, will no longer entertain a Nikon/os product.

Yes, I know, I'm well aware that I'm possibly cutting off my nose to spite my face.

I bought mine immediately after the euphoria that was engendered by its appearance, probably at the instigation of the quite brilliant German magazine UWF (UnterWasser Foto - Film und Video) who first declared it to the world in a supplement to their standard publication - I still have every UWF, unfortunately no more.

Sadly although truly excellent in some respects, especially as to the lenses and that viewfinder, underneath it all the RS was a truly compromised system (I've seen it stripped bare and some of the engineering is quite shocking, O Ring issues, FLAT RUBBER SEALS fer gorsakes - I hasten to add from a water integrity point of view). The list BTW goes on.

I will not make that mistake again - it was supposed to see out my diving days. I hope that is also a salutory lesson to those that lust after a digital equivalent.

Don't, DO NOT, just jump in as I did.

The RS was a camera in a housing, just like the previous Nikonos cameras starting with the Calypso. The difference was that with the Nikonos non-SLRs Nikon had an excellent basis from which to engineer their products. Yet they even got those wrong with the IVA.

Cheers,

Christian

Dave,

I must have missed it. Can't seem to locate the link anymore. Wonder if someone got wise and removed it?

Joe

another faker me thinks too

click here for the dpreview link

photo is linked from here

Thanks, Giles.

Looks too phoney for me. I would like to see the back. It really does look like a IVA with some good Photoshop work.

Joe

Somebody has way too much time on his hands, and needs to get a life beyond Photoshop. If Nikon ever gets back into underwater photography, it will go the Olympus or Canon route, making dedicated, cheap plastic housings for their point and shoot cameras. The potential market for a digi Nikonos is too miniscule for them to bother with.

I know it's been a while since anyone replied to this, but eahauer is pretty much right on. I'm not sure the market exists for someone like Nikon to get back into the dedicated underwater camera market. I've done quite a bit of work trying to size this market because I work for a company called PiratePro, that has been exploring how to create a housing that allows Nikonos V lenses to be used with a contemporary commercially available digital camera. We found that building the digital camera into the Nikonos housing natively was way way too expensive to even contemplate. If we were a company the size of Nikon and we had committed bulk orders from someone like the military, maybe. Otherwise, it[s basically a non-starter. Plus, housings setups are pretty much the way everyone's going these days. We've come up with a design that we'll be bringing to market in early winter of 2009 that pairs any of the Nikonos V-compatible lenses with a brand new Olympus E-P1. Even that, I think, will be a niche product.

Shana Lyons
www.piratepro.com

Hi Shana,

Lenses for the 4:3 and M 4:3 cameras are designed to mate with the 4:3 sensor, so they have no crop factor. The Nikonos lenses are designed for the 35 mm format which is a 3:2 format. In your Q&A section no reference is made to the "crop factor" which will apply using Nikonos lenses on the M 4:3 sensor. If it is X2 the Nikonos 15 mm lens would have the effective AOV of a 30 mm lens is this correct?

Phil Rudin

http://www.sfups.org/Galleries/PhilRudin/index.html

Interesting.

I started this thread as merely a "pipe dream" Not expecting that anyone would ever make a housing that could use Nikonos lenses.

I should be noted that Nikonos lenses do not have the usual 35 mm degree of coverage.

For instance the legendary Nikonos 15 mm has the same angle of coverage as a 20 mm lens on a 35 mm SLR. 94 degrees if I remember.

The 20 mm Nikonos had the same coverage as a 24 mm lens on a SLR.

That is correct - since the Nikonos lenses are water contact they don't have the same AOV as a land lens behind a dome port.

Cheers
James

(Full disclosure: I work for PiratePro and did most of the design engineering on the housings and lens adapters.)

I always thought the Nikonos 15mm lenses were rectilinear lenses with very low pincushion or barrel distortion underwater. If that's the case, then the ray of light from the subject (through water) to the front nodal point has to be parallel to the ray of light from the rear nodal point to the image on the focal plane. In an air-contact rectilinear lens, those two rays also have to be parallel. Doesn't this mean that the Nikonos 15mm lenses have the same AOV in water as air-contact rectilinear 15mm lenses in air?

If you have a low distortion air-contact 15mm lens behind a dome port, and that dome port is centered around the front nodal point of the lens, you should approximate the angel of view of the Nikonos 15mm. If the dome port isn't centered on the front nodal point, or if you use a 15mm lens behind a flat port, then the AOV will be different. The angle of view will also be different if you use a high distortion lens like the Tokina 10-17 (the Nikonos will have more AOV corner-to corner, but less AOV top-to-bottom). I'm not disparaging the Tokina 10-17, that's a great lens, but it has the distortion of any fisheye lens, and it really complicates the AOV equations.

David Lewinnek
www.piratepro.com

The marketing of this lens as a 15 mm by Nikon was an advertising strategy as much as it was truth. If the Nikonos 15 mm, 20 mm or 28 mm lenses are used out of the water they will retain the AOV of the same above water lenses. In the case of the 15 mm 110 degrees, you just won't be able to find a point of sharp focus with the lens above water. Used under water the AOV is reduced to around 94 degrees (as with a 20 mm above water) and sharp focus can be obtained. In contrast the after market 18 mm rectilinear made for the Nikonos RS is the Nikon lens mount and guts of a Nikkor 18 mm land lens mounted behind a large dome port. This lens will focus as well above water as below and retains the same AOV both above and below water.

David,

Since the Nikonos lenses were designed for the 35 mm format (36 x 24 MM) and they are being mounted on a M4:3 sensor (18 x 13.5 MM or smaller) it appears to me that the 15 mm Nikonos lens AOV would be reduced from 94 degrees to 47 degrees and that the rest of the Nikonos lens lines AOV would also be reduced by the same X2 crop factor. Is this in fact the case? Also since these lenses are all manual focus lenses do they allow the in focus green dot to come on when focus is obtained? also will this housing have a port mounting system as well so that the M4:3 lenses can be used like the old SubEye film system that could use both housed Nikon lenses and the Nikonos RS lenses with an adapter?

Phil Rudin

The AOV of the 15mm lens WILL be reduced, from 94 degrees to somewhere around 58 degrees. This ratio is a little different from the crop factor because the AOV of a rectilinear lens changes with twice the arctangent of the sensor size divided by twice the focal length; putting the arctangent function in that equation makes it extremely nonlinear, so halving the sensor size doesn't halve the AOV.

We are also making adapters that will hold the lens 4mm closer to the sensor, which will increase the AOV by various amounts. They will work like the opposite of an extension tube (extension tube decrease the AOV and icnrease the magnification, the reducing adapter will increase th AOV and decrease the magnification). This is a rarely used optical trick that only works on short focal length lenses being adapted to a smaller lens mount in a format that uses a smaller sensor.

I haven't tested the 12mm Sea & Sea fisheye lens, but I expect it to have a fairly wide FOV, especially on the reducing adapter. An angle of view of around 130 degrees (equivalent to a 10mm rectilinear lens in air) seems likely, but I don't know the exact distortions imparted by the Sea & Sea fisheye.



I haven't been able to get the EP1 to reliably show the green dot with manual lenses. I've been focusing by looking at the screen to check the focus. I've also checked the focus by using the info mode where a press of the "OK" button magnifies a window of the screen by 10X. If you're interested in the behavior of the EP1 with manual lenses, there are many people using the EP1 with Leica lenses.



No, it won't.

I haven't seen the SubEye system, but I would be fascinated to take apart that adapter. As I understand it, the RS lenses don't use the standard Nikon F-mount mechanical controls for focus and aperture, so an adapter would need some swiss-watch style linkages to transfer motion.

As for ports for other lenses (like the four-thirds 8mm fisheye, the 20mm f/1.7, or the 50mm f/2.0 macro), we're not offering those, at least not in the first run of products. Our goal is to add a new capability to the marketplace: the ability to take digital pictures through Nikonos lenses. We don't have much to add to the products that let you take photos from behind ports. In the future, we might add a product that lets you do both, but that's not the focus right now.

Hi david,

Thanks for your reply.

I attached two links to information on the SubEye reflex camera, http://www.subspace.ch/English/Subeye_eng.htm
http://www.unterwasserwelt.de/html/subeye_reflex.html

The camera has a Nikon mount that takes Nikon lenses and a bayonet mount system to enclose the lenses with what ever port works for that lens. The RS lenses also mount to the standard Nikon lens mount and have a short extension ring that bayonets to the camera side and accepts the lens o-ring on the lens side sealing the lens to the housing. The lenses all move via a power button that moves the elements of the lens in and out with the same type of motor that drives an auto focus lens. It is to slow to auto focus but works as a power focus and can be used with both land and RS lenses.

Phil Rudin

I went to Australia with a guy that shot the Subeye system. The film was held in a separate back, like a medium format camera.
I always wondered why someone didn't make a digital back for it.

Cost I figured.

Thanks to your suggestions, the FAQ section has been updated to include:
1. The angular field of view,
2. The focal length of a lens with same field of view when used with a full-frame sensor and a dome port, and
3. The focal length of a lens with same field of view when used with a full-frame sensor and a flat port with water outside the flat port.

If anybody has suggestions for better or clearer ways to communicate the lens field of view or 35mm equivalent information, I'd love to hear them.

Also, thank you to everyone who pointed out that the 15mm lens has a 94 degree AOV, instead of the normal AOV of a rectilinear lens with a 15mm focal length.

David Lewinnek
david@piratepro.com
www.piratepro.com

Hi all,

I've been following this topic with high interest. As many of us, I was a big fan of the Nikonos sytem when I started to take pictures underwater. I think the Nikonos V+ 15 mm was a light and fast camera when taking pictures freediving. For example when taking pictures of dolphins and whales, so I am waiting with high interest what's going on with the Pirate Pro project.

There's something that I always wanted to ask about the Rs lenses. Maybe some of you can answer that!
I remember the 18 mm made by Rene Aumann. As some of you pointed, it was a Nikon land lens behind a dome. I never had one, but I was told that this 18 mm was usable in both, Rs body and Nikon F land bodies. In the other hand the RS lenses were not usable on Nikon land bodies. Does anybody know why? I've been comparing the rear bayonet of RS and Nikon lenses and are almost identical, so I never understood why the RS lenses did not work on a Nikon land bodies.

Thanks

Nikonos RS lenses had their own mount. They only worked with the RS and the Subeye reflex. If I remember correctly, the Aumann 18mm lens did not have a normal Nikon F mount.

The backs of Nikon F-mount and Nikonos-RS lenses are similar, but not quite identical. This site describes the Nikon F-mount features better than I ever could. Using the terminology of that site, my 50mm Nikonos-RS lens is missing feature 2 (the groove that tells the camera the focal length of the lens) and feature 4 (the tab that tells the camera the maximum aperture of the lens).

Even though the bayonet mount will let me mount the 50mm Nikonos-RS lens to my Nikon D90, the lack of the groove and tab means that my camera won't recognize the lens, and won't engage the focus or aperture controls. I can still take pictures with the camera in M mode, but the lens is locked at minimum aperture and the only way to change the focus is to point the lens up (focus moves to infinity) or down (focus moves closer).