About Peau Productions (MAPIR, Inc)
Peau Productions was started in 2009 as a means to provide DIY optical-based touch-screen parts to customers around the world. The best method to construct affordable touch-screens at the time was to use "hacked" web cameras capable of seeing the infrared (IR) lights used to illuminate objects on the touch surface. The camera of choice was the SONY Playstation Eye and we offered many lenses and filters along with various IR LEDS and lasers for customers to complete their often ambitious projects. Our Youtube channel began to get updated constantly with How-To videos showing customers how easy it was to build their own touch-screen setups with our parts. New touch-screen technology using IR LED touch frames was becoming more accurate and prices were more affordable so we partnered with the industry leader PQ Labs and became a distributor for their superior touch frame products. We continue to drop-ship thousands of touch frames to our customers around the world for installations in board rooms, museums, clothing stores, retail stores, malls, and many other locations including their own homes.
In 2013 the GoPro® HERO® cameras were getting more popular and we started to get inquiries about aftermarket lenses for them and similar m12 lens based cameras. After testing a large catalog of lenses from the best factories we could find we settled on our first megapixel lens product offering. We learned from our customers that the lenses with little to no distortion were preferred so we sought out every one we could find that worked with the most popular cameras. We arranged the lenses into collections based on which cameras they worked in and produced many more videos showing how customers could easy install them into their cameras. In 2015 we began offering a unique software service to remove the lens profile put onto the cameras by GoPro® to restore the color shift at the media edges, and in 2016 the same service as a customer-downloadable DIY software package. While not being the first company to offer aftermarket lenses marketed specifically for cameras such as the GoPro®, by 2015 we became the largest and most well known company doing so globally.
With the knowledge of selling the various lenses from other companies we knew that the only way to offer our customers what they really wanted was to design our own lenses. In 2015 we launched the 3.97mm lens with the goal of super sharp, low distortion 4K video and reduced lens flare. Thanks to its 22mm (35mm equivalent) focal length our micro-drone aerial customers found it to be the perfect field of view in terms of market gimbal stabilization capabilities at the time. We received huge praise from companies like 3DR with the majority of their marketing team using our 3.97mm lens in their GoPro® cameras. If you saw any of their SOLO marketing media they were more than likely shot with our 3.97mm lens.
2015 was a big year for Peau Productions with our move to a much larger office containing amble warehouse and showroom space. We also hired many new employees to reduce order shipping times and achieve our same or next business day processing time goals. On display in our showroom are IR-frame touchscreen televisions where you can interact with 3D models generated from our aerial-mounted modified cameras. You'll also find on display our most popular products where you can get a hands on experience and ask engaging questions from our skilled technicians. Relax on our comfy couches as you wait for your camera to be modified, or step into our Virtual Reality cave experience.
With more and more customers using our cameras on aerial drone platforms we created the MAPIR brand in 2015. MAPIR cameras are turn-key surveying cameras with high quality optics and filters at an industry-affordable price. Our first camera, the Survey1 was a huge success and was followed up by our best selling Survey2. With each product launch we learn from our customers what issues they are having and work to improve the next camera with these new features. Many of the products you find on the Peau Productions website are a direct result of our innovation with MAPIR. You can read more about MAPIR on the MAPIR About Us page.
With the popularity of our 3.97mm lens many of our customers starting asking for even narrower focal length lenses. The narrowest and sharpest lens available in the market was the physically huge and heavy 7.2mm 10MP lens. It worked well for 4K video (8.4MP) but due to its size and weight did not play nicely with motorized gimbals and waterproof housings, nor was it capable of resolving the tiny pixels in the 12MP+ sensors. Our customers wanted even better quality optics and the same extreme low distortion from a narrower lens, so we designed the 8.25mm lens. Our 8.25mm lens is currently the world's most compact, sharpest, narrowest and least distorted lens in the m12 lens mount factor (and possibly all lenses 12mm in diameter and smaller!). We learned a lot from our customers and made huge improvements in edge sharpness, flare reduction, and chromatic aberration. We even found a micro-drone, the Yuneec Typhoon H capable of stabilizing the narrow FOV of the 8.25mm lens for 4K video use with no modifications required to its stock camera+gimbal. The compact 8.25mm lens can be used in waterproof housings such as the GoPro® HERO® and is lighter than most plastic-barrel stock lenses making gimbal balancing easy.
Peau Productions continues to innovate with quality micro-optics and skilled technicians to provide customers the products they want, even if the camera or drone company doesn't offer it. For the best of what we have to offer please make sure to also browse the MAPIR site as well as subscribe to our Peau newsletter.