Are you familiar with how you focus a rangefinder camera like a Leica?
You are NOT looking through the lens but a small viewfinder offset from the lens. The viewfinder is usually on the far left. Then there is another window a few inches away that are reflected at various angles by mirrors into the main viewfinder. When you focus the lens that angle of that mirror moves.
In an SLR or compact camera or iphone the camera sensor or viewfinder is seeing through the lens that is used for taking the picture. So you adjust the lens until you see with your eye that it is in focus and that's it.
With the rangefinder camera the viewfinder is ALWAYS in focus. So you use this secondary image (see the sheep in the first link) and when the 2 images overlap then you know the lens is now in focus.
This camera in the article does not seem to be an optical rangefinder that I described above. When you look through the viewinder everything will be in focus as it is not looking through the lens.
So how do you focus? Instead it uses LiDAR to measure the distance and display that within the viewfinder. It also displays the distance that the lens is currently focused at. Many lenses will have focus scales like this.
Here is the description from the camera's web site.
"LiDAR" range-finding with high accuracy and distance up to 12m
In-viewfinder display with
Light-meter with aperture range set by selected lens
Lens focus distance display, and LiDAR rangefinder distance display
Focus accuracy indicator
So I think you get 2 numbers, the lens focus distance, and the LiDAR distance and it is up to you to adjust the lens until the 2 numbers match. Or move closer or further away using your feet.
Good for the time but dated. When your negative is the big it doesn’t matter as much but it’s absolutely not as sharp as more modern constructions.
It’s also arguably a step down to use his printed body versus the original Mamiya press in terms of functionality other than reduced weight. Still an impressive design though.
I see Fuji GW690 bodies with a 90mm lens on various sites like keh in the $1200 range.
I have a Hasselblad 500 series camera from the 1980's that my father bought at a pawn shop near a military base. In the early 2000's professionals were dumping tons of medium format gear as they switched to digital cameras so he got a wide and telephoto lens. The problem is I never use them. They are big, heavy, klunky, and slow to operate. I've never liked print film. I used to be able to get 2 hour development of E-6 slide film but now I have to mail it off and wait over a week so I don't bother. I look at digital backs but most of them are for studio setups.
My dad used to have that Hasselblad model a loooong time ago. If you are willing to part with it (for less than the "collector" price these are sold nowadays), you could make a nice Christmas gift for him.
(I am Rhododender on Reddit)
When I was a teenager I responded to bans by trying to get around them like warning stickers on music.
Talking about the dangers of D&D or the Satanic Panic seemed idiotic to me and still do.
But when people explained why something was bad I would listen. Did their concerns seem legitimate?
I'm 50 and I've never smoked a cigarette. In the movies it looked cool. But I saw older people with horrible health issues and also the smoke smelled horrible and made their breath stink. Those people were not lying to me about the danger of tobacco.
So are people lying about the dangers of social media? But if you think it is bad for teenagers then how do you convince them that it is? I would rather have commercials with teenagers talking about how they were depressed or developed eating disorders or whatever from looking at social media. Then they stopped and now they are happier with more real life interactions.
I can tell you that I deleted my facebook account in 2016 (didn't use it much) and haven't been on instagram in 5 years. I don't miss it at all. All facebook ever did was annoy and anger me.
The first had been around for about 4 years when I joined and had products that made money. They were trying to get acquired. They had partnered with 2 companies making products specifically for them. One of them offered to buy the company for $30 million but the founders thought their company was worth $300 million. They said no and then money started to run out and people started leaving. In the end the assets were sold for $2 million.
The second startup was created by former coworkers and I joined after it had existed for 4 months. We worked like crazy for the first year and got our prototype out. We had a lot of interest but it took me a while to realize that the 3 founders already had net worths from $5 million to billionaire level. When I heard about offers in the $30 million range they just weren't interested in selling for so little. I left after 3 years and the company floundered another 2 years until they shut it down as people left.
These are perfect examples of how misaligned expectations can quietly sink a company. In both cases, the teams actually had something: revenue, interest, real offers. But when the founders anchor on a fantasy outcome, they stop making grounded decisions.
You can survive almost anything in a startup except delusion about what the company is worth. Turning down a realistic exit, or holding out for a number that only exists in your head, creates a slow death spiral: morale drops, talent leaves, and eventually the market decides for you.
Really appreciate you sharing these — they highlight a pattern that happens far more often than people think.
I started working in 1997 and lived through the dot com bubble and collapse. My advice to people is to diversify away from your company stock. I knew a lot of people at Cisco that had stock options at $80 and it dropped to under $20.
Because of the way the AMT (Alternative Minimum Tax) worked at the time they bought the stock, did not sell, but owed taxes on the gain on the day of purchase. They had tax bills of over $1 million but even if they sold it all they couldn't pay the bill. This dragged on for years.
> FreeBSD was also picky with its hardware choices. I'm not sure that the hardware I had would have been fully supported
Copy / paste of my comment from last year about FreeBSD
I installed Linux in fall 1994. I looked at Free/NetBSD but when I went on some of the Usenet BSD forums they basically insulted me saying that my brand new $3,500 PC wasn't good enough.
The main thing was this IDE interface that had a bug. Linux got a workaround within days or weeks.
The BSD people told me that I should buy a SCSI card, SCSI hard drive, SCSI CD-ROM. I was a sophomore in college and I saved every penny to spend $2K on that PC and my parents paid the rest. I didn't have any money for that.
The sound card was another issue.
I remember software based "WinModems" but Linux had drivers for some of these. Same for software based "Win Printers"
When I finally did graduate and had money for SCSI stuff I tried FreeBSD around 1998 and it just seemed like another Unix. I used Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, Ultrix, IRIX. FreeBSD was perfectly fine but it didn't do anything I needed that Linux didn't already do.
I've been hearing about this for years and it makes sense theoretically but has anyone ever actually seen it? What are the errors reported? Or does the drive return bad data but reports no error?
There was a guy on reddit that took about 20 cheap USB flash drives and checked 1 every 6 months. I think after 3 years nothing was bad yet.
I've copied OS ISO images to USB flash drives and I know they sat for at least 2 years unused. Then I used it to install the OS and it worked perfectly fine with no errors reported.
I still have 3 copies of all data and 1 of those copies is offsite but this scare about SSDs losing data is something that I've never actually seen.
Of course. Cheap USB sticks in particular "spoil" pretty frequently due to firmware corruption while being stored in a drawer, this is something they're known for since the invention. I had this happen with a few. For some designs, it's possible to reflash them and they'll work again.
You are NOT looking through the lens but a small viewfinder offset from the lens. The viewfinder is usually on the far left. Then there is another window a few inches away that are reflected at various angles by mirrors into the main viewfinder. When you focus the lens that angle of that mirror moves.
This is what it looks like in the camera.
https://licm.org.uk/livingImage/Rangefinder-Camera.html
Here are some internal diagrams showing how the light bounces around in the camera.
https://leicaphilia.com/how-a-rangefinder-works/
https://www.macfilos.com/2024/11/22/fokus-pokus-time-to-reas...
In an SLR or compact camera or iphone the camera sensor or viewfinder is seeing through the lens that is used for taking the picture. So you adjust the lens until you see with your eye that it is in focus and that's it.
With the rangefinder camera the viewfinder is ALWAYS in focus. So you use this secondary image (see the sheep in the first link) and when the 2 images overlap then you know the lens is now in focus.
This camera in the article does not seem to be an optical rangefinder that I described above. When you look through the viewinder everything will be in focus as it is not looking through the lens.
So how do you focus? Instead it uses LiDAR to measure the distance and display that within the viewfinder. It also displays the distance that the lens is currently focused at. Many lenses will have focus scales like this.
https://www.pointsinfocus.com/blog/2010/07/modern-distance-s...
Here is the description from the camera's web site.
"LiDAR" range-finding with high accuracy and distance up to 12m In-viewfinder display with
So I think you get 2 numbers, the lens focus distance, and the LiDAR distance and it is up to you to adjust the lens until the 2 numbers match. Or move closer or further away using your feet.