Digicams with five second exposures?
On the spark post, K asked:
Are digital cameras with five second exposure times really that common?
It always pays to have lots of cash and expensive gadgets when you’re making all these money-saving Make projects…
Good question. But lots of cash and expensive gadgets are not needed.
Of course, all of the Digital SLR style cameras can do this. Most even have a “bulb” mode where you can manually click the shutter open and closed at will. I usually just stick with a 5 second or 2 second exposure and use my little homebrew remote trigger.
If the $500 or so entry point into the DSLR market is too steep for you (or the cameras are just too damned big), then you can go with any of a number of compact and sub-compact cameras that can do multi-second exposures.
I quickly bopped over to DPReview.com and used their buying guide (link on left nav bar — can’t direct link it due to Ajaxian stupidity) to do a Features Search on:
- Min Shutter: 30+ seconds
- Price: < $200
- Only Current: YES
Thinking that there might be one or two. Wrong. There are at least 10 cameras that match the above. There is even a camera that can do timelapse photos — can be programmed to take a photo every N seconds/minutes — for under $200 that can also do 30 second exposures!!
(BTW: The fun factor payoff and collaborative creativity that all of this has fostered is awesome! Thanks to the Make folks for catalyzing this hack oriented age of enlightenment.)
March 28th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Canon’s small cameras can go up to 15 seconds (if you read the manual to find that well-hidden feature) which may be enough for the original question. That should give an even broader choice.
March 28th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
“hack oriented age of enlightenment” – indeed… it does feel like a special time with all manner of hardware hacking possible, documented on the net, and relatively cheap.