What's new
  • ICMag with help from Phlizon, Landrace Warden and The Vault is running a NEW contest for Christmas! You can check it here. Prizes are: full spectrum led light, seeds & forum premium access. Come join in!

CHECK THIS OUT, super cheap awesome trich examiner, macro photography camera $11

Anti

Sorcerer's Apprentice
Veteran
i was thinking same thing !
i bought my RS scope for 8$ .

I bought a RS scope for $13... and it was terrible. I returned it the next day and ordered my bionicam. Even though it was almost three times as expensive ($36) I do not regret it at all.

Plus, this way I have a record of my tric development. I don't have to try to remember what it looked like last time.
 

growMEDS

Member
amazing deal at $11 - I just paid 40 and that was the best I could find. I still feel like it will be a good investment
 
D

DJXXPLATINUM

got the eye clops for $38 on amazon!!! can't wait to try it out!!! djxx
 

Anti

Sorcerer's Apprentice
Veteran
The eyeclops bionicam comes with a composite video cable so you can hook it up to your TV. When you do this, it disables the 3" screen on the unit itself, but not its ability to take pictures and video.

After working with mine for a few weeks, I've found the following:

Use with some kind of stand to steady it. (I use a microphone boom stand, like this:

A-50.jpg

I'm sure that a better solution could be found, but you can find these at any music instrument store, many best buys, walmarts, etc. for as low as about $14.

There's also a thread around here where someone took theirs apart and then built a little integral stand using metal rods. Seems a better solution than the mic stand, but requires some ingenuity.

The other problem is that the button where you take the picture is attached to the handheld unit. So they expect you to hold it steady AND push the button... that's what makes this a kid's toy, IMHO. If you can find a way around these issues, it's capable of taking a great snap.

What I've been doing lately is just hooking it up to my TV and bringing individual plants near the TV and just viewing it on the TV screen. You can quickly see well enough to check your tric development, and then take extra special care only when you need a shot for posterity.

If I can figure out how to take mine apart and move the keypad off the device, I am going to do it. That way, you can get your shot all lined up and not worry about it shaking when you hit the 'a' button to take a shot.

But the shots... oh man. They're so pretty:


 

growshower

Member
so glad this worked out for everyone, sorry to get you all psyched up about the price, guess i just found a deal, but still i think for the quality of the pics and video that you can get, even 40-50 dollars is awesome
 

FreezerBoy

Was blind but now IC Puckbunny in Training
Veteran
"We hate you! We hate you, we hate you, we hate you! We hate your hair that's always curly, your clothes that are always clean and your car that's always white! We hate you!"

Professor Fate- the Great Race.

Seriously tough, you jobbed us good, I for one, am thrilled for you.
 

growMEDS

Member
I tried for a good 20 minutes to ge a decent picture.
I got one half decent - every time I would press the button while the view looked good but the picture came out black every time.

I gave up last night but will give it another shot soon.
 

Corpsey

pollen dabber
ICMag Donor
Veteran
another thing to try is to take video then when you bring it into the computer stop the movie whenever you want to take a picture and screen shot it. seems to work better then just pushing the picture button to blurry up my clear shot.
 

Pops

Resident pissy old man
Veteran
Wal-mart in my area decided to discontinue them. That is why they were so cheap. I missed out by a couple weeks.
 

growshower

Member
dam sorry about that pops, i think someone mentioned earlier in the thread you can get them online from walmart for 30, or ebay may be a great place as well
 

Payaso

Original Editor of ICMagazine
Veteran
Damn, I'm running to Wally World right now! Even at $30 it's a steal for a PITA that can do that.
 

growMEDS

Member
another thing to try is to take video then when you bring it into the computer stop the movie whenever you want to take a picture and screen shot it. seems to work better then just pushing the picture button to blurry up my clear shot.
I thought about that but thought it might not be as good quality ?
One thing that sucks - or am I doing it wrong? - I have to touch the camera to the nugs and I can feel the camera having my precious sticky thc on it. :(
 

Anti

Sorcerer's Apprentice
Veteran
I thought about that but thought it might not be as good quality ?
One thing that sucks - or am I doing it wrong? - I have to touch the camera to the nugs and I can feel the camera having my precious sticky thc on it. :(

Yeah. I noticed that, too. My cam came with a little circle with words printed on it really small. If you focus the eyepiece until you can read really small print relatively in-focus, you don't have to smash it ALL THE WAY up in the bud, but you still have to get pretty close and you may lose a few pistils.

I took these last night:




There are lots more where these came from!

All of these were taken using the output video to TV option. Lot easier to tell if you got a good shot right away. I took maybe 45-50 shots total and 35+ were good'uns. (Also used a boom stand to steady the cam.)

 

Anti

Sorcerer's Apprentice
Veteran
Enhancing your Photos in Photoshop:

Enhancing your Photos in Photoshop:

I just got a PM and figured I'd go ahead and post this for everyone. I'm not a photography expert but I've been screwing around with Photoshop for years and I picked these tips up somewhere along the way. Some of them, somewhat recently. Anyway, I thought I'd share for those of you out there who don't do a lot of photo editing.

Bon.G.Loder said:
Hey Anti, thanx for the tip, I picked up one of those Bionicam's and was wondering if you've done anything to increase the brightness in any way??? Mine seems to have very dark photos.

What I do is take it into Photoshop (I'm using CS3 but it should work in older versions) and do an "auto-level" (ctrl+shift+l) on it. Then make a duplicate on a second layer (ctrl-j) and then apply "equalize" (alt+i,a,q) to the second layer. This will make it look pretty crazy depending on the original picture.

Then I take the equalized second layer (which is on top of the old layer) and use the "Soft Lighting" filter and then set the opacity somewhere between 30-60% so that 60-30% of the bottom layer shows through the top layer (experiment per image to find the best spot.)

After that, I crop the picture to 800x600 @ 72 dpi and save it for device/web.

Takes less than a minute per picture once you get it figured out, and saving it this way strips all data from the image to help keep you more anonymous.


(this works great with any pictures you take, not just trich pics.)
 

growshower

Member
yeah i have to press mine pretty close to the bud, i wish i could redo the eyepiece, but i guess, it is intended to be a childs toy so what can i say
 

Anti

Sorcerer's Apprentice
Veteran
Here's an example of a before edit and the final photoshopped result:

(I keep it as bright in the room as possible when taking them, firstly.)


before / after

All I did was follow the steps outlined in my last post, above.


 
Top