Skip to main content

Focusing screens for the D40

Yes, you can get them for the D40.

There's a very pricey one from Katz Eye. It runs into $100 to $155. It has some good reviews.
There is a pretty cheap one you can get on ebay right now ($34 with shipping), and it might be the same you get from focusingscreen.com (This one costs $40).

A video tutorial for replacing the focusing screen:


But I would use rubber tipped tweezers, rather than straight metal ones. And don't film your self doing it... :)

The google search url.
Labels:

Comments

  1. NickCAugust 20, 2009 at 9:01 AM

    Nice, I'm surprised to see how easy it is to replace the screen. Now other than personal preference, is there any real reason one should consider changing the screen? Are there any 'problems' with the default one?
    Thanks for the continued great review of the D40... you are definitely making my decision process a lot easier.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kaushik GhoseAugust 20, 2009 at 10:58 AM

    Hi Nick,

    The only real reason I would get the focusing screen is for nostalgic reasons (The manual focus film Nikons had them and I loved them).

    For very low light work (like the long exposure shots) there often isn't an object in one of the three AF zones. This means I have to pan the camera, focus on an object, lock the focus and then pan back. Instead of that I prefer to manual focus, but as you can see, I'm not that good at it.

    The prism focus screen would come in useful at that point.

    Best
    -Kaushik

    ReplyDelete
  3. Kaushik GhoseAugust 20, 2009 at 3:42 PM

    Well, not really, because the prism is at the center. For these shots I was turning the lens focus ring all the way to the stop, hoping that was infinity, but I have a hunch that the AF lenses might leave a little lee way beyond infinity. I had a similar issue with my film AF zoom. I gotta try MF in daylight and see where infinity is

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Remove field code from Word document

e.g. before submitting a MS, or hand manipulating some formatting because Word does things (like cross-references) so half-assed [from here ] Select all the text (CTRL-A) Press Ctrl+Shift+F9 Editing to remove anonymous comments that only contain thanks. I really appreciate the thanks, but it makes it harder to find comments that carry pertinent information. I'm also going to try and paste informative comments in the body of the post to make them easier to find.
24 comments
Read more

h5py and multiprocessing

The HDF5 format has been working awesome for me, but I ran into danger when I started to mix it with multiprocessing. It was the worst kind of danger: the intermittent error. Here are the dangers/issues in order of escalation (TL;DR is use a generator to feed data from your file into the child processes as they spawn. It's the easiest way. Read on for harder ways.) An h5py file handle can't be pickled and therefore can't be passed as an argument using pool.map() If you set the handle as a global and access it from the child processes you run the risk of racing which leads to corrupted reads. My personal runin was that my code sometimes ran fine but sometimes would complain that there are NaNs or Infinity in the data. This wasted some time tracking down. Other people have had this kind of problem [ 1 ]. Same problem if you pass the filename and have the different processes open individual instances of the file separately. The hard way to solve this problem is to sw...
Post a Comment
Read more

Reading spreadsheet data in Python: The lack of a good ODS reader

I try and keep long term data in as simple a format as possible, which means text where ever possible. In earlier times I would enter data in excel spreadsheets and then read them from my Python programs using the xlrd package which is excellent. This works well, but in the back of my mind is the thought that someday Microsoft might do something funny with their business model making office software more janky to use and all my fears about keeping data in proprietary formats would come true. Oh, look, that day is today . So, I'm completely abandoning the MS Office suite and going back to basic text files. However, there is a tension between keeping tabulated data in a simple form, such as csv, and entering it in a convenient manner. Excel, of course, nags you everytime you edit a csv file and save it. Libreoffice is excellent: it handles loading and saving in a very streamlined fashion. However, every time you open up the csv file you need to tell Calc what widths you want...
Post a Comment
Read more