Hi everyone. I'm primarily a nature and bird photographer. However I decided to extend my reach with a spotting scope set up to digiscope. I purchased a KOWA TSN-99A spotting scope that came equipped with the Kowa TE-11WZ II 30-70X eyepiece. I also ordered a NOVAGRIP Double-Gripper phone mount to hold my iPhone 15 Pro on the eyepiece. I immediately discovered that the iPhone's native camera app would not allow me to chose which of the three lenses it used. So I did some research and downloaded an app called BeastCam. That gave me the choice of using whatever lens I wanted. Since the 24mm lens uses the 48 megapixel sensor and the other two are only twelve, I standardized on that lens. But then I found that to get an image that would fill a 16:9 video frame with the black circle from the scope, I had to boost the magnification to about 1.5X. Which meant that I was just essentially cropping the sensor output as the iPhone doesn't seem to actually have an optical zoom lens. So my results were somewhat disappointing after editing the 4K files.
So after doing some research I discovered that Kowa offered the TE-80XW Extreme Wide Angle Eyepiece. I ordered an Open-Box unit to save a few dollars and hoped it would solve my issues with getting full frame and full sensor video files. It did! I lost the ability to zoom to 70X, but I didn’t really care as the video started to get unpleasant at that magnification. Plus 40X seemed adequate for my needs. I found that with the iPhone’s 24mm main camera I was getting a frame-filling 16:9 image with a setting of 1X on the camera, (no sensor crop).
With further tests I was somewhat surprised that to a great degree, the BeastCam app’s image was very dependent on image stabilization settings. I’ve attached three screen grabs from my test video all from the same location. One with I.S. turned off. One with I.S. on at NORMAL. And one with I.S. set to CINEMATIC. The difference in magnification is clear. What I learned was the image stabilization works by cropping the image around the perimeter so that movement can be cancelled out by shifting the crop around to cancel out shake. The higher the stabilization, the greater the area that is cropped back. I found that with it turned off I got just the smallest bit of black ring ing the corners. Not really too much to worry about, and easily removed in post. Anyway I'm gradually learning. And I hope to have things nailed down soon.
Kevin
So after doing some research I discovered that Kowa offered the TE-80XW Extreme Wide Angle Eyepiece. I ordered an Open-Box unit to save a few dollars and hoped it would solve my issues with getting full frame and full sensor video files. It did! I lost the ability to zoom to 70X, but I didn’t really care as the video started to get unpleasant at that magnification. Plus 40X seemed adequate for my needs. I found that with the iPhone’s 24mm main camera I was getting a frame-filling 16:9 image with a setting of 1X on the camera, (no sensor crop).
With further tests I was somewhat surprised that to a great degree, the BeastCam app’s image was very dependent on image stabilization settings. I’ve attached three screen grabs from my test video all from the same location. One with I.S. turned off. One with I.S. on at NORMAL. And one with I.S. set to CINEMATIC. The difference in magnification is clear. What I learned was the image stabilization works by cropping the image around the perimeter so that movement can be cancelled out by shifting the crop around to cancel out shake. The higher the stabilization, the greater the area that is cropped back. I found that with it turned off I got just the smallest bit of black ring ing the corners. Not really too much to worry about, and easily removed in post. Anyway I'm gradually learning. And I hope to have things nailed down soon.
Kevin
