Elliot Phillips and Fabienne Serreier over at Hack-a-Day get to destroy things and talk about people destroying things—and then hopefully put the pieces back together in a useful fashion—for a living. I envy them. Today's hack, submitted by an intrepid Hack-a-Day reader is the fastest way yet I've stumbled across to void the warranty on a DSLR. It's also one of the coolest DSLR hacks I've seen to date, and a compensation for what may be the most inexplicable decision made by what seems like all DSLR manufacturers: taking the manual focus "split-ring" off of the ground glass. Selling AF lenses with manual focus capabilities and selling straight manual lenses for DSLR cameras but not offering any way to actually focus manually with any accuracy has never made much sense to me. Maybe people with 20/20 vision can just eyeball it; I can't.

There are, of course, solutions. Most manufacturers sell replacement ground glasses. Many DSLR photographers are also fans of the inexpensive, high quality (and unfortunately instruction free) glasses sold by Haodo Fu. Jan-Erik Skata, though, went a step further. He pulled the glass out of an old Miranda dx-3 he picked up for €20 and ground it to fit his Cannon 300D (a.k.a. Digital Rebel here in the U.S.). The directions are a little thin ("first remove the screen") but instructions for replacing the glass in your camera should be easy to come by. The rest is simple: mark your new glass with dimensions of your camera's glass; grind the glass to size (Jan-Erik used sandpaper, a grinding wheel or belt sander would make things go more quickly), thin out the edges of the new glass if required, and pop it in.

A few things to keep in mind, though: 1) if your camera is still under warranty, this will almost certainly void it. 2) If you use an old glass, it won't have hash marks to show your camera's autofocus and metering regions; you'll have to keep track of that in your head. And 3) manual focus ground galsses tend to be clearer, and therefore brighter, than DSLR glasses, especially the center focus ring. This means you may need to adjust your exposure slightly to avoid underexposure, particularly with any center-weighted metering.