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    • Now I have mostly progressed my GX85 Super-16mm "conversion" I am turning back to a more generalised look at film and The Aesthetic as it pertains to cinema. My next step is to convert my S16 emulation into a 35mm emulation, which shouldn't be that hard as it's the same stuff but just using more of it, so turning down the grain and backing off the softening and size of halation and bloom etc. In order to get my bearings I've collected a bunch of frame grabs from cinema over the decades, and some fascinating things have emerged. Observation One: Film doesn't look like it's gotten cleaner and sharper This is what people say, but when scrolling through the references, you can find things like this from 1952's Bend of the River: and then things like this from 1994s Speed: Obviously you need to be smart about things, so both these shots are likely to be locked off, focus wouldn't be missed, lit naturally and exposed properly, etc.  There are lots of shots from Speed that are soft, but it's an action movie so lots of them are probably motion blurred or the action was impacting how well that frame was focused etc. Luckily, License to Kill from 1989 will get us back to safe ground with some nice sharp images: But how are these images possible all the way back then? One thing that comes to mind is that when consulting Kodaks excellent Chronology of Film page, you see that the negative stocks started off as very low sensitivity and increased over time, so it's like comparing the high-ISO of todays cameras to the native ISOs of past cameras. Observation Two: Images look like they've gotten less worse The further back you go, the more you find shots that should be sharp but just aren't.  The example above from 1952 was a real outlier, as most of the images from that time looked more like these from 1955s A Bad Day at Black Rock: I suspect the quality of the lenses. All the above looked like wider shots, so maybe that lens wasn't so good (wider lenses are harder to make).  Maybe it wasn't at its sharpest F-stop.  A lot of the sharpest images across the frame grabs I looked at were close-ups, and I suspect back then a 50mm at it's sharpest aperture and focus distance was a lot better than a wider lens at whatever F-stop and focus distance was required for the scene. Check out these grabs from 1955's The Seven Year Itch: Monroe was at her height of popularity so there's no way she's getting the beat-up lenses from the rental company or a camera team that doesn't know what they're doing.  I can't think of any reason these two particular images would be softer than the technology at the time would have allowed. By 1971 things seemed to have gotten a lot more consistent with Diamonds Are Forever: Then if we fast forward to the last few years, we get films like 2024s Trap, which looks quite sharp and even approaching a digital look: but still has films over-emphasis of high-contrast edges: and it's a similar case with 2023's Poor Things which can look quite sharp: but on wides it still has that film look: and it's only when the lenses get crazy that the edges start looking more vintage again: Anyway, lots of food for thought, but it's almost like the sweet spot of film has remained relatively similar in performance but has gotten drastically wider as you can now get images that are that sharp and clean in much less light and across a vastly wider range of lens focal lengths and apertures. Another variable is that prior to digital projection, the final image had to go through many more layers of film than it has to now.  Back in the day the image pipeline was something like: negative → interpositive → internegative → release print, rather than just negative -> scan, and it's not like our projection lenses haven't gotten better now too!  Let me know if you can think of any more variables that I didn't mention, but it's like we're looking at lenses get better and film be useful in more situations, rather than it get "better".
    • It actually feels like it's in a softer set of threads, so it's not like metal on metal where it grips and then slides easily, this just requires a certain level of force to get it to move and once moving it requires the same force to keep it moving. I would absolutely never ever put something like WD-40 into an optical assembly!  Not only would it potentially dissolve or melt any plastic it comes into contact with, but solvents can 'wick' into things and spread across surfaces (especially bad if those surfaces are on the inside and you can't get at them to clean them), and solvents will evaporate and likely fill every void or space with fumes, which can potentially condense on the surfaces of the lenses and dissolve the coatings etc. I've glued things together before with PVA glue, which is water based, and after the glue had dried (ie, the water in it evaporated) it had condensation all over the sensor and lens etc.  I set it on a windowsill in the sun to dry for a few days and it cleared up fine, but I think that was mostly because it was water and that didn't interact in any way with the lens or sensor elements.
    • Speaking of the dials registering the wrong way, I've mostly noticed that on dials when you rotate them quite slowly, so it seems like trying different speeds might be the best strategy. It's also good to get a decent light source and look over the surface of it by looking at the reflections as you rotate it.  I'd be looking for any evidence it's been dropped etc, especially on anything that's meant to move like the buttons or dials etc, but also on the corners.  I dropped my GF3 on one of its corners and as it's a metal chassis it just got a little flat spot and wrinkle, but you can feel it if you pay attention.
    • I was going to suggest one of those friction clothes, mum has a few in the kitchen drawer for hard to open jam jars. If that didn't work, one drop of wd-40 on the threading left to  sit over night, only one drop mind you as you dont want to find out that wd-40 might be also good at delaminating glass elements
    • The faster the lens being boosted, the more likely you'll have some speed booster artifacts.  Even with Metabones, I don't think I'd go past 1.2. If you really wanted to go that way, and it's off-topic for this thread, but I'd suggest looking at the Voigtlander 29/0.8 which, IIRC, is native for M43.
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