Strange. I had an old Powershot that died after a 3 foot drop.... This gives me an idea though, built in parachutes for often dropped electronics.
Please. Those little dSLRs aren't really "pro" cameras at all. I mean, it doesn't even have an adamantium cage with gaskets that keep out lava!! All kidding aside, that's a pretty funny story. My D-Rebel fell into a camp fire. As far as I could tell it still worked, but I sent it in to have it looked at anyway. Canon wanted almost $400 for repairs. It gave me an excuse to buy a new camera.
I had a D100 for ages and being honest I treated it like crap, it was dropped more than once and the strap came loose while on my bike with it around my neck, you can imagine the damage It still worked right up until I sold it
That's great, I can't wait for the video of it. I notice the video camera didn't fare so well in the fall!
did it bounce? Very impressive. Maybe a labs test on how far you can drop hardware before it dies. Pointless, but probally fun
To be fair, it does look like it fell in some soft soil. Any lab tests for maximum drop height would have to factor the position of the camera when it landed, the speed at which it landed, and the surface on which it landed. While the story is pretty cool, after a certain point the height becomes irrelevant. I'm not sure at what point the camera would reach terminal velocity, but I suspect that for the sake of quality testing 3,000 feet isn't any different than 200 feet.
Thats impressive. Glad I have a XT as a backup. Makes you wonder what the xxD xD series can handle - re-entry from space? lol
I'm as impressed as anyone, but there's more to this than the obvious (or than anyone in that other forum noticed). A flat plate like the carbon mounting system in those pictures will generate genuine lift when it's spinning like that. The terminal velocity for that whole camera assembly is impressively slow as a result. Want to test this? Cut a small rectangle of paper, maybe 1cm wide and 5cm long, and drop it, trying to give it a bit of spin. It might take a few drops before you get a good, steady spin (like the video shows), but when you do, pay attention to how slowly the paper falls, and compare this to the speed on the drops where the paper just flutters to the ground. If you do it just right, the paper will actually travel horizontally, as well - it's technically gliding. There are some complicated and boring parallels between this experiment and the way airplane wings generate lift. It's not particularly efficient, but it's still noticeable. I guarantee that plate is the only reason the camera didn't go home in a garbage bag.
I'm not an engineer, but I'm not sure a small metal mounting bracket would really generate lift in the same manner as a small piece of paper. The aerodynamic drag on a small piece of paper is very different than that of a metal bracket. In addition, a small piece of paper is much different than a metal bracket with 2 cameras mounted to it. Not only do the cameras add a relatively significant amount of mass, they also change the aerodynamic signature of the entire thing. I still think this is more a case of a camera landing in just the right way in just the right soil, with just the right conditions.
Fortunately, I am. I won't deny that the cameras will reduce the effect, but it's not going away completely. That's a pretty big mounting plate, and it's spinning fairly quickly. And it's not drag, it's genuinely lift - there's flow circulation around the plate, which is the same way wings work. No question, the landing won't be as gentle as a piece of paper dropping to the floor, but it's still going to be much softer than the camera falling 3000 feet all by itself (terminal velocity on a camera like that will be awfully high). I'm sure the tree branches and the video camera helped cushion the fall a bit, as well.
Pardon my ignorance in the finer details of flight mechanics, but wouldn't the mounting plate need to be shaped accordingly to create any real lift? I thought that an airfoil's shape was an important factor in creating the pressure difference required to generate lift. As such, a basic metal plate wouldn't work the same way - at least, not in a significant enough manner to slow a dual-camera setup. Stupid physics. Makin' my head hurt and stuff.
No, you're right - ordinarily, the shape is incredibly important. The trick is in the spinning - because the plate is spinning, not just slipping through the air like a wing does, it acts in a non-obvious way. It gets complicated to try to explain the effect, but it's enough to say that the spinning plate moves the air around itself in much the same way a regular wing does. There have actually been experimental radio-controlled aircraft built using this trick - a quick Google search turns up the FanWing project.
