chrisdelroy

On 01/02/2022 at 14:38, kylemcdonald said:

Hello all, I’m helping with a cultural heritage project that requires an extremely low light video camera. We’re trying to capture a well-documented but never-photographed luminous phenomena that happens on the ocean at night. By following the posts on this forum and others, I learned about mono full-spectrum conversions. But my journey has been rough, and I wanted to ask for guidance from the experts

I got lucky with my first debayered camera: I found a Sony a7S II on eBay that had already been modified by Monochrome Imaging. It worked great for a few months. Check out this test video I recorded showing glint from Jupiter on the Pacific, just off Venice Beach in Los Angeles.

But two weeks before we set sail, the camera stopped working. It would go into a restart-loop when I turned it on. One repair center told me it was a problem with the sensor, but Monochrome Imaging offered to take a look (they have been amazing) under the suspicion that it was the main board. We just found out it is not the main board.

Right after this glitch appeared, I contacted LDP LLC (MaxMax) in hopes of converting an a7S III to mono full-spectrum. LDP has also been amazing, they took the rush job, shot some beautiful test images, and shipped it to me. But when I unboxed and turned it on, the display briefly showed some blocky artifacts, and then only a black image. I was devastated. Now I am looking for another a7S III sensor in hopes that LDP can try conversion again, but I’m concerned that we don’t really know what caused the failure.

So I’m here to ask:

1. Does anyone have experience with successful a7S II or a7S III mono conversions?
2. Where might I be able to find a reasonably priced a7S III sensor? The best I've found so far is $1600 on AliExpress.
3. Is there anyone else besides Monochrome Imaging or LDP, preferably in the US, who have near 100% success rates? Or am I hoping for too much here? I know there are different processes (chemicals, scraping, laser) but I’ve had trouble figuring out who else is still operating.

I also wanted to share some code I worked on as part of this project. I made a tool for extracting the raw 4K high-bit-depth pre-bayer-mixed image from an a7S III. If you stream from the a7S III to a device that can capture the ProRes Raw encoded video, like a Ninja V, it’s possible to get 4K grayscale video at 30fps.

Hi Kyle, 

I have a sony a7riii currently being converted by Monochrome imaging and really would love to know if there is a way to get the video footage out of it in pre debayered form to get low light astro video that's better than my a1 converted digitally. Would love to know what you were able to do in this regards and how you did the sii footage. Thanks!