Sorry for being imprecise - what I want is a manual exposure control, yes, not a strict lack of exposure control. The latter would be a bit useless.

I understand you work on this in your spare time - thank you very much!

Is there potential for this in the future, or is it a limitation of something which can't be changed?

As far as I can tell, setting the auto-exposure to 'off' in video mode gives only black output, until for stills. No fiddling with other switches seems to help. Has anyone had any luck with this?