Rottweiler

This is an 1100D. Thanks

Apologies, there seems to be no edit button

That first photo is HDR. The edges are cropped by about 10 pixels, going for a 100% debayering seems to be no worth the risk for such a small sacrifice. No flat calibration, just normal processing as a regular photographer would do it.

Now some more normal images -

Hi Everyone! I would like to post our latest attempt using glass polish rather than mechanical scraping (although the pencil tip attempt I read about looks also interesting). Also, if you have any parts left over from debayering attempts please send me a PM, spare parts are nice to have around!

The 30s exposure completes (can hear the shutter) and then I get err70. Now cooled down and I'm getting err70 immediately on starting time exposure.

I now have one of my ambient cooled 1100Ds (Rebel T3) stripped down to sensor cover glass ready to apply heat. Before that I tested it in both EOS Utility and APT latest version and all was working fine - took 10 x 10s subs in APT. Sensor was running at 25C.

The reason the error appears at the end of the exposure is because it is detected on readout. I saw the image you posted with the horizontal and verticle traps. This is from going a little too deep with the scraper, maybe try a wider tip. It does seem the wooden scraper is safer than the metal one as luis said, I think using a metal scraper is something that comes with practice. Although I have to say we will be sticking with our polish only method, since we also have occasional troubles from scraping methods.. The polish choices, I would stick to anything used normally for optical purposes. It is being that it is confirmed again and again that newer sensors are just plain harder to debayer than older ones.

Sorry to see the 350D, Gina. For what it's worth, just like an old banger, you can strip the camera and sell the parts for more than the dead body body. All the main parts are worth a 10er each easily on eBay. Take out the autofocus sensor, shutter, mirrorbox, the power supply, the motherboard, the LCD, even the bayonet and lens cap are worth something. Strip it as much as you can and auction them with a 2.50 starting bid I will take all the bayonets, lens caps, lens lock pins and the tiny spring for sure. I didn't know there were sensitive parts under the blue edge though, live and learn! Never hit them before, what a stroke of luck

Looking good, Gina and Filip

The higher MP sensors from the 550D onwards include micro lensing layer to improve the "efficiency" I wonder if this makes the job harder on these sensors...

You should see the results when you put the sensor back in once the microlenses are gone but the bayer remains, the drop in sensitivity is quite surprising. Microlenses are great! The increase in sensitivity from removing the bayer shows just how much light is being sapped away by the mask.

It's OFF I went all round the bond with a needle removing some of the glue then I tried the craft knife again. This time it popped of - in sections The sticky pad held the pieces together and close examination shows that all the gold wires are intact

Looking good, Gina

Plenty of patience required

Yay! I think we just found a positive point to spending so much time waiting for clouds to clear. Amateur astronomy has done wonders for my patience

then again maybe a very fine small scratch is enough to kill it, if that's the case we are in trouble...:/

Yup! :/

Also, have you considered making a scraper out of lead? It's nice and soft compared to silicon.

Lead won't work, we tried it. Besides it not holding an edge for long and being toxic, it also galls onto the surface and is very hard to remove. The huge lead atoms also make a pretty sturdy light shield.

I now have white all round the glass but I can't prise it off using reasonable force - just tiny semi-circular slivers of glass cracked off the surface at the edge. I dare not use any more force or I'll crack the glass. Would it help to use any more heat? Anyone?

Once the bond is broken you can remove it as you would a sensor out of a 450D, by running a scalpel or stanley blade around it until it pops off. I also agree with Luis about the frame, it will make getting under the glass easier.

Does anyone plan to try out our abrasion method? Glad to see the epoxy and heating working already

but then again maybe a very fine small scratch is enough to kill it, if that's the case we are in trouble...:/

I can confirm this, and yes... indeed! :/ I don't know what is worse, that you lost 6 hours or that the new sensors cost 200 euros+ at best.

Gina, you will have to desolder these shields, some of them have screws under them. Luis, black image is a dead sensor, sorry buddy Seen it all too often... Usually from going too deep or a broken wire. You can get some pretty cool modern art if you go too deep but not enough to get a black image. Lots of colours! Also debayering can introduce defects like dead columns or traps.

It's pretty annoying that we have to debayer these cameras, because adding the bayer matrix is an extra step for the manufacturer. Such is the power of mass production I guess.

Any error code generated from the debayering is pretty much terminal, you can't undo going too deep or breaking a wire. Err 70 is "Malfunctions related to images have been detected.", if something breaks, it is usually the last thing you did to it... RAC, great to read As for realigning the sensor, it is pretty critical but you can realign it yourself with a bit of patience.

Luis, could you share what type of wood you used for your successful attempt? I had a play with a broken sensor with wood from a pallet, wood from a pencil and also some dry wood from the car park floor(lol!). No success at all for us, couldn't even get it started. Just seemed like the wood was too soft and wouldn't hold a point or edge.

Info for that image - JTW Ultimate Mono 600D, F6/460 Telescope Service ED, 6nm Astronomik h-alpha clip in h-alpha filter. No dark, no flat and no bias calibration. Image rights - Dr F Hemmerich.

SH2-129 - 2h40m of 20m exposures @ ISO1600.

IC1396 - 2x1200sec ISO1600, 2x600sec ISO3200, 8x300sec ISO 6400 (running out of night and also experimenting)

Here is another one Dr Hemmerich sent in (a very productive guy)

JTW Ultimate Mono Canon 600D, Sigma 70-200 telelens at F2.8, 6nm Astronomik h-alpha clip in h-alpha filter. No dark, flat or bias calibration.

16x 600s ISO1600

Very strange that the sensors in both our pictures appear green... Have you annealed the copper? It will make it softer. If you can't find your oilstone, get a diamond lapping tool. They are on ebay for under a tenner.

I also would like to apologise about the comment I made about avoiding the dremel to the OP, I didn't mean to offend. The dremel will work and is much faster than the hand methods, it's just very difficult to get a flat surface using a cylindrical tool. Especially as it is so quick to remove the bayer. Although doing the first 90% with the dremel and finishing by hand could offer the best of both worlds. We also tried the dremel way before we figured out to protect the gold wires, which ended badly for the sensors With them protected by epoxy you can also get right up to the edges too.

Here is some more motivation for people tempted to try this mod out.

I'm a bit puzzled by the green appearance in the 2nd photo and wondering if this is just a spurious lighting effect or a thin layer of remaining CFA.

Looks promising, I think you might be there if you can avoid the scratches . Can't really tell with the lighting, the photos I took also have a green hue and there is definitely no bayer left. The easiest way to see if the bayer still is there is to put it back to the camera and take a test shot. If there is any bayer left you will get a dim colour image. Or you can make a test swipe with a cotton bud and polish, you will get a green spot on the cotton bud. The colour in the matrix seems to be very powerful, even a trace of it will cause a visible stain.

Been looking for slow setting epoxy resin - how about this standard Araldite? - says it give a long working time - http://www.ebay.co.u...d=271132932907

Looks good

That would be ideal if we could find something like that! I know jewellers rouge is too coarse (found out the hard way), no idea about car polish. Glass polish works fine so long as you are careful. I wonder how things like the pitch that mirror makers use would fare? Or anything else used optically?

BTW Louis, would you be so kind as to email me some of your flats? I would like to do a comparison, so we can figure out the best method.

You're welcome, Alistair!

Looks like the heat gun works, Gina. I think I will get one and also make a cute little nozzle for it. Shame the sensor has a broken wire, still good to practice on though. I tried several ways to fix this but never succeeded. Soldering tiny wires, pressing the gold back in place, all failed. Also a great shot from Luis! All the excitement of this thread got me back to the task too. Actually we found a method that avoids the gold scraper altogether, but is quite a bit slower. I wrote up a tutorial on it. http://www.jtwastronomy.com/tutorials/debayer.php

I really look forward to when this mod is as commonplace as the modified webcams. So many more people will be able to take great photos, when you look at the forums what these young kids are doing with almost no budget, it is amazing!

Takes too long from HK and probably wouldn't fit my gun but I could make something similar.

Maybe knock one up with some folded aluminium foil or thin copper sheet?

Now where can I put that second observatory?

In my garden

Great to see Filip had success with the desoldering station. Also confirmation of our heat method, more than one way to skin a cat! Gina, I would not recommend you try to remove all the glass at once with a heatgun or pen torch, I can confirm if you try to do too much in one run it will crack the glass. i don't think it is worth the risk for the time you will save. I try to do no more than a few seconds at a time. I like Filip's solder rework station better than a pen torch though.

As for a purge, you can also buy bottled argon/CO2/nitrogen mixes at a welding supply store in quite small bottles for hobby sized welders. Not sure how dry it is, I imagine dry enough, I suppose you could put that through a cannister of dessicant first then through a tube to the camera? Do you have problems with fogging of the inside of the sensor? This is something I have not seen before.

Looking forward to the results with the gun, Gina. I did a sensor today as an experiment with some new tools we made, I tried a plastic 'scraper' (made from a sensor swap) and glass polish, so the CFA was removed entirely by abrasion. It eliminated the tiny scratches you can get with even a gold scraper, but I have to admit that it comes with a lot of practice. I suspect this is a the best method for solvent-proof sensors. The results are quite satisfactory, the flats are really nice, although still a bit uneven. I dont think we will ever get a perfect method for the solvent-proof sensors. I was told by a chemist that it may be possible that no solvent will touch these CFAs once they are 'set', or whatever the terminology was.

Here is the sensor (some bayer still visible at the bottom, removed after taking the picture )

Now here is the interesting part. I think maybe someone can write a script to eliminate this. There is a definite 2x2 pattern, possibly due to preamps correcting for the spectral response and what the camera is expecting to hit a particular pixel. As we no longer have red, green or blue. The camera does not know this though. Even in monochrome mode it would be performing some correction surely? I hope someone with more knowledge in this area can contribute.

You will note also a stripe artifact near the bottom, meaning this sensor is destined for the bin. Not sure what caused this, perhaps slightly too deep with the abrasion although it is not visible on the sensor. The camera was in pieces down to board level on the desk, so no shielding, etc was present.

Gina, that is what I thought when I first saw them. If you take one of your busted sensors and rip the driver board off, you will see they are SMT components and not pins. At 0.7mm you will have just cleared them. We like to keep the channel as we then get more thermal mass behind the sensor, about 2x as much material. Your method insulates better though. I wonder which is better, more mass/less insulation or less mass/more insulation? As far as accuracy of the EXIF goes, we found it to be just a few degrees at 0C, and anywhere between 10-30 degrees at -30C. You really can't trust it. When you deep cooled a 5D MkII, some of them report +110C! Which is just bizarre

Alistair, if you only consider pixel size yes, but you also have factors like the microlenses, throughput of the bayer, readout noise etc. Also the 350D is 12bit as you say. The heat removal of the cover glass, you heat one spot, cool and then heat the edge of the spot, this makes the white spot longer and you repeat until you take the white spot all the way around the sensor. Obviously heating a sensor is not great and you really have to be quick with the heat and patient with the cooling. As for CCD vs DSLR, a 5um CCD pixel is almost pure active surface area, I think the DSLR sensor pixel size is not the actual size of the photosensitive part. CCDs are superior and here to stay for the foreseeable future, modding a DSLR is a compromise of performance and price. Modding CCDs can also be done, curious why it is so rare. Budget level cameras all really benefit from cooling upgrades.

I don't have any sample images with the 1100D sent in yet. The only ones we made so far are for stock purposes, bar 2 which we have only recently delivered, and clear nights in Holland rarely coincide with a free morning to sleep it off. I don't have the luxury of a garden or balcony, so I have to supervise my equipment all night....

Thanks so much Rottweiler, great to see you sharing your professional experience.

i had a few questions. when you say the 1100D is "FAR" more sensitive than the 600D, is it really discernible? would you have any tests with a debayered 1100D?

I really like the 600D for its swivel screen so was hoping to debayer that rather than the 1100D.

with using heat to remove the cover glass, can a soldering iron's tip be used? ever tried that? or would a hot air rework station work as well? The soldering iron tip, if it can get hot enough, would be a lot safer than hot air.

how difficult is it to cool a 600D compared to a 1100D?

what other models have to successfully debayered? that info would help a lot for us in deciding which model to try next.

Thanks so much for the info.

Alistair

The 1100D definitely is more sensitive, how much we don't know. It is in our photometry data somewhere. We were getting saturation from Vega with exposures of 1/500 of a second if I remember rightly (80mm WO 580mm f/l). Surface area of the 1100D pixel is roughly 45% more than the 600D.

Cameras we have successfully debayered - 450D, 600D, 1000D, 1100D and the 5D MkII (took forever, horrible, also new sensors are crazy expensive). I don't think a soldering iron will work, but perhaps a hot air rework station will, it may even be safer than a pen torch. Localised heat still, but not as hot.

As for cooling, the 600D type sensors. which I think are also found in the 550D, 60D and 650D have only a small gap behind the sensor, around 0.6mm. Whereas the 1100D and older models like the 450D, etc have a gap of 1.6mm, this extra mm gives an extra 10-15 degrees of cooling in our cameras. Partly because the extra mass means the cooling is not overpowered by heat production but also this extra thickness means you can cut a channel in the back of the cold finger to reduce losses from unneccesary cooling of the driverboard. The temperature sensor is also on the driver board so this also introduces an inaccuracy in the EXIF that is not in favour of the 1100D either. This channel can cut with a milling maching, dremel or by hand, it needs to be at least 1mm deep. Another thing is that the 1100D has to have this channel, there are small SMT components on the back of the sensor, without this channel they will be ripped off and the sensor will have horrific diagonal noise bands. You cannot get access to reattach them unless you fancy desoldering the sensor and the knowledge of what goes where, realigning the sensor is all but impossibly too. The best you can get from this is a sensor to practice debayering on...

So I would say it is easier to cool a 600D, but the stock perfomance of the cooler will be slightly lower, you can compensate for the lower efficiency of cooling a 600D with a slightly stronger power supply and possibly set point cooling. With the same peltier, power feed and thermal compounds, last winter we had an Ultimate 1100D at -35 while an Ultimate 600D was reporting -20. I don't have any hard data for cold finger type installations with a single stage peltier, but the difference is still there, but less pronounced.

If a scratch is deep enough you could hit something critical and get things like dead columns or traps appearing (can be interpolated out though). If they are invisible at F36 then I would say whats the problem? I wouldn't even attempt to polish these out. you will only take the layer down to the level of the scratch anyway. Maybe some accurate lab testing would find a discrepancy in count or something, but for astrophotography? Kind of reminds me of a colleague I had who complained his car rattled at 100mph... stick to the speed limit! Hahaha!

The good thing is that a flat field pretty much fixes remaining spots of bayer (not too big) and also the scratches to an extent. I have never tried a 350D. DCE is not so expensive, try it, you may have a pleasant surprise waiting for you. When you modify anything you are always going to be compromising. If the compomise is so small it takes a lab to find it, victory!

The other thing is you need to convert to TIFF before performing any processing, flat fielding a CR2 from a mono modded DSLR can yield some gnarly results, because the computer is still treating it is a colour image and doing some preprocessing based on 2x2s, I think, at least. Image processing is not my forte, but this seems to work, the reasons are pure speculation.

Thank you JTW. Can the Dichloroethane be applied on the bayer array leftovers on a 100D or 450D to make the scrapping removal process easier? Will it weaken at least the CFA array in a 1000D? I'm having a lot of trouble removing those CFA leftovers even under the microscope!

Many thanks

The 100D possibly, the 450D probably not. Take the gold scraper and use the longer side. You can buy 1 grain gold ingots on ebay, they need a bit of modification and the lapping needs to be perfectly flat. Make a holder for it. If you use the short side it will scrape better, the longer side can be used for more selective scraping of remnants. Possibly the most important factor with this is to know when to admit defeat. 100% removal is perfection, perfection is hard to acheive in reality. By chasing that stubborn spot you could scrap a sensor or make a sratch that is far more noticeable. Flat field correction becomes more important than even your dark frames with a mono DSLR. Sub micron defects will be visible, power tools are a bad idea and you won't get that precision with your hands. I have probably debayered 20+ sensors now and I still would not say it is possible to be perfect. I can only hope our hobby grows to the point where we are offered mono DSLR sensors with microlenses from sensor manufacturers. I did enquire about this, sensor prices with 4 zeros on the end put a swift end to that. Production quantities are too low...

It is nice to see so many thank you's too It makes all the mocking from the sensors (they can be cruel) all worthwhile! Perhaps if this mod becomes popular we could take our reward in it being called the JTW method? Similar to the SC1 mods of Mr Chambers We started as a hobby that grew out of control, so to see something we did be potentially helpful to many people really makes us proud!