Home Forums ROV Self/Home Build ROV Discussions Has anyone tried liquid-filled cameras? Reply To: Has anyone tried liquid-filled cameras?

Reply To: Has anyone tried liquid-filled cameras?

Home Forums ROV Self/Home Build ROV Discussions Has anyone tried liquid-filled cameras? Reply To: Has anyone tried liquid-filled cameras?

#31717
John Douglas
Participant

Thinking "outside the box" for a minute, what if you potted the electronics and exposed just the lens to water? Years back I had a Nikonos dive camera that had a fish eye wide angle lens that had ports so seawater could fill the lens. I remember it worked very nicely, although cleaning it was a bugger (and I never operated the camera in anything but very clean water with good visibility, so that might be the achilles heel of this idea). The lens probably has to be customized to account for the added optical effect of seawater, but otherwise might give you the ability to go great depths with a cheap/small camera.

Thank you for your response. It gave me something to look into.

I went looking for that camera lens but couldn’t find it. Saw this site though:
http://www.camerasunderwater.info/equipment/nikonos/index.html

I looked around for a bit and I think that if I flooded the lens rig I would have to use either a fixed focus pinhole camera (small aperture so not so good underwater) or go with a manual focus rig. Whatever fluid I use would cause the focal length to shorten, making the image shrink or go out of focus.

It looks like the auto-focus functions might not work correctly either, as they depend on calculations based on c. The speed of light in water is different than its speed in air, so I’m not sure how off the camera would be. It may not be making calculations so accurately that it makes any difference, in which case that would help. I think I might have to flood the lens with oil as opposed to water to keep the receptors dry though, which would throw off the way the camera was seeing things vs how the auto-focus was seeing them.

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