The apogee of the magic lantern industry coincided with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, when hand-painted slides were superseded by mass-produced slides, allowing for a democratization of the medium. In the ensuing presentation, he recapitulated the sprawling life of the magic lantern, from its inception in the mid-seventeenth century to its demise just after World War I. This was scary but not unpleasant: a kinetic light show, accompanied by glass harmonica, that satisfied the popular taste for macabre thrills.Īnd so when Richard Balzer, one of the most important collectors of proto-cinematic instruments and optical toys in the United States, was invited to deliver a lecture at the Harvard Art Museums in June, he began with a warning to the audience: “You may find some curious and interesting things happen this evening.” In 1799, he staged a performance at the Couvent des Capucines, a convent in Paris, that utilized rear projection, in which a magic lantern is mounted on a trolley behind the screen, allowing the lanternist to create the illusion of a phantom approaching the audience. As Benjamin Martin, a London-based instrument maker, observed in 1740, the magic lantern was “used to surprise and amuse ignorant people…for the sake of lucre.”īy the late 18th century, the magic lantern show, in which the operator would deliver narration to accompany the slides, was well on its way to becoming a theatre of the occult, culminating in the Phantasmagoria spectacle, invented by the Belgian showman Étienne-Gaspard Robert. Before long, the magic lantern was fully the preserve of sleazy showmen. This boxy apparatus, first described by the Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens in the late 1650s, began as an instrument of learning but was later co-opted by traveling salesmen, who delighted audiences with hand-painted slides that were raunchy, ghoulish, and profane. A descendent of the camera obscura, the magic lantern was first developed as an aide to scientific inquiry, a primitive device that required a sequence of lenses, transparent slides, and a light source (initially whale oil, but later argon gas, limelight, and finally, the incandescent lamp). If you want to keep updated, there’s an EOS R thread over on the Magic Lantern forums.Three hundred years before the first movie projector, there was the magic lantern, a portable optical device that projected images on a wall or screen. Perhaps we’ll even be able to override that ridiculous 1.8x 4K crop. The screen turning green demonstrates that it’s possible to change camera registers and execute code on the camera’s main processor.Īndrew offers a little more information about the implications of this over on EOS HD, but it will be very interesting to see what features they might unlock. While a green screen LCD might not look like much success, the camera did indeed load the bootloader. But when Andrew got to testing the other firmware file, the results were more favourable. Andrew writes that he and A1ex assumed the test was a bust and that the EOS R would be incapable of running Magic Lantern. It was recognised as a firmware for that camera, but it just didn’t understand it. Unfortunately, the first firmware one wasn’t even loaded by the camera. It’s a bit like the “Check my PC” thing to see if your computer’s capable of running the latest version Windows – except for Canon cameras to see if they’re capable of executing Magic Lantern code. They essentially probe the camera to determine if it can even run the Magic Lantern code. The two test files were based on the bootloaders of the Canon 80D and Canon 5D Mark IV.
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