How a film camera superimposes the date onto photos [video] | Hacker News Reader

How a film camera superimposes the date onto photos [video]

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254 pointsaacook44 comments

I always get a kick out of seeing my videos randomly on HN. Ask me anything.

How did you come up with a question that I have always had, but never thought to ask?

My thoughts exactly. And then at the end when he was like, “and why is it always that redddish color despite coming from a white light?” I was like that’s a damn good question!

Do you have any commercial off-the-shelf tools in your shop that you dislike, but are the best option available for a particular job?

I'm not Ben but having worked in a lot of labs my answer is pH meters, they routinely are annoying, fragile and finicky but there really isn't a better way when you can't just use paper test strips.

I agree! I've had the best luck with this one, which is far better than the average pH pen from Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Waterproof-Accuracy-Suitable-Testing-...

What do you think of the Atlas Scientific pH probes?

Haven't used them. Looks good. Costs a lot more than the Amazon one, so could be different class with different expectations.

That's a good question. A Windows laptop. It's super annoying, constantly updating itself, forced reboots, network disconnections, fragile, yet is required for many CAD and acquisition/control proprietary software.

On the fragility I have had good results with HP elitebook models with aluminum casing. (Not the ones with plastic casing!) These are common in corporate fleets and so are relatively cheap on eBay.

I suggest obtaining a copy of Windows 10 LTSC, much better stability and no mandatory updates/forced reboots. Might make it a bit more reliable.

Yes, or even one of the stripped-down W10 versions like Ameliorated or Ninjutsu.

What are your go to book recommendations? No topic in particular.

Also! Just want to add that your work is really inspiring. I look forward to your videos more than any other. Cheers!

Understanding solid state electronics - https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Solid-State-Electronics...

On Food and Cooking

Inventions of Daedalus

Surly You're Joking, Mr. Feynman

Materials selection in mechanical design

Fantastic Electronics / Iovine

Gadgeteers Goldmine / McComb

Forrest Mims Engineer's Notebook

Building Scientific Apparatus

Thanks! Let me know if you ever have a topic suggestion.

These are great! Any fiction work that you have enjoyed?

I have to admit, I almost never read fiction. Maybe Catcher in the Rye, and that was years ago!

Huge fan of your videos. What are the chances of quitting your day job and working on side projects/youtube videos full time, like StuffMadeHere?

I really liked owning my own business (MRI-compatible computer peripherals 2006-2011), and I'll very likely start another unrelated small business in the future. I also like to do YouTube videos as a hobby or at least Patreon-supported hobby, and not depend on them for main income, because I think it changes the character of the videos. If I depended on videos, I'd probably also start thumbnail optimization, A/B testing, YouTube face, sensationalistic titles, growth hacking, and all the stuff that I don't like as a viewer, but genuinely works to make more money. Patreon support has been a huge help in this regard.

Please, please don’t quit your day job. So much of what I enjoy about your work is that it’s ready when it’s ready, doesn’t come in a specific schedule and avoids so much of the needy attention grabbing that the professionals do.

Probably the most useful part of keeping YouTube as a side gig is that you are less likely to fall into the algorithm treadmill that encourages all creators to burn themselves out to enrich Google.

Your content is wonderful very impressive. Dumb question, but do you consider yourself a citizen scientist, or engineer, or maker or whatever, or do you dislike labels?

Hi Ben, as a long time follower, I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for what I consider an absolute jewel of a YouTube channel.

(I always get a chuckle out of your "Hope you found that interesting, bye!" at the end of your videos. Every time I'm thinking to myself, hell yeah I found that interesting, that's an understatement!)

Thanks! It's nice comments like yours that keep me making new videos.

Hello :) I'd like to extract a similar date module to use it on a different camera. Do you think it would be possible to make it print date past 2019 ?

Thanks

You and Tom7 are the absolute best content creators on YouTube. Everything else is filler content between your videos ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Can't agree more about Tom7!

Do checkout MarcosRep, tons of humour, highly recommended! And of course AvE...

Sounds like you and I would get along..already subscribed!

Applied Science is a delightful gem of a YouTube channel - I recommend to have a browse through the archive of videos if this presentation style and content interests you. Ben is a great presenter of complex topics.

The DIY electron microscope episodes are classic

DIY Scanning Electron Microscope - Overview (2011)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdjYVF4a6iU

His recent(ish) video showing an Xray time-lapse is one of if not the most visually interesting thing I have seen https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=j-FHbHoiwNk

One guy does private electron microscope, supercritical co2, x-ray gun, cake baking, I would never believe this if it wasn't on video.

Oh, I can see that this is going to be a new rabbit hole for me, and likely to last a long time.

Thanks!

I was picturing the engineers who must have done like a 1000 iterations of this stuff before they were able to come up with a crystal clear image on the film.

What an adventure it must be to make these things and one day finally having the joy to see the whole world use your inventions like this.

Having never worked on any hardware I can only imagine how much fun (and test of patience!) it must be to use/bend the laws of physics to make such things.

Yes! I had a similar thought: we have the word sonder for the realization that everyone in the world has complex lives, it would be great to have a word that represents the amazing complexity of every single human-made object.

I look around me, and there are hundreds (thousands!) of human-made objects around me, and many of the more complex objects are made of multiple simpler complements themselves (like the projector in the video) and each of these objects likely involved a large group in their initial invention and then even more in their mass production. The invention also relies on previous discoveries.

Every single made object is probably the cumulative effort of hundreds or thousands of people- and even the most simple made object likely has a network of technological advancements and associated people that would be too complex for any single person to comprehend or map.

I would love to watch a documentary of someone picking the most ‘boring’ or simple made object and try to uncover the people and technology required to make it- would be a fascinating watch!

As a side note one thing you learn over the years is to always put the date on things and make sure the year, four digits, is there too not just the month and day.

Yep. I kick myself for not dating my notebooks better as I move them onto a digital timeline.

The 1977 camera mentioned halfway through the video might have been the first consumer camera that superimposes the date, but it was common for aerial photos to have metadata like that added to the margins, like https://map.geoportail.lu/aerial/1977_30000/pdfs/0181.pdf

There are also digital cameras that "print" the date onto the pictures, I saw someone had this feature turned on and I thought explaining EXIF to them might be too difficult.

I know all about EXIF, but whenever I'm taking pictures that may end up being used in legal disputes[1], I deliberately turn on this feature. THis is for multiple reasons: EXIF data can be easily faked, everyone knows how watermarked timestamps work, and the baked-in timestamp will persevere across all subsequent media conversions (jpeg-to-bmp, emails, uploads, print-to-paper,picture-of-a-picture, PDFs)

1. e.g. pictures after a traffic accident, received goods in poor condition, or state of property at start of a lease.

I loved watching this video. I'm working on a product that turns your phone into a disposable camera that automatically mails you 4x6 prints (https://latercam.com). People have been asking for date imprinting and I found the video while researching.

The 1990s, when even low cost constructions still used a million screws, making it possible to non-destructively take apart this thing.

This was really cool to watch.

Wonderful stuff. This isn't a subject area I've ever really sought out but I enjoyed the video anyway

TL;DR: there is a little light, a mirror and a small see-through LCD screen forming a projection through the back side of the film. Since the distance between the light source and the LCD screen is relatively large, the light acts as a point source and you don't need a lens for the image formation.

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