Frankencamera • Hacker News Board

Re: Frankencamera

#11

Post by marincounty » Sat, May 16, 2015, 9:32 PM UTC

"I first tried printing my design at school but the quality wasn’t high enough for such detailed work, so I sent my design to a 3-D printing company in London which used the incredible SLS printing method to create a strong, accurate and flexible print in nylon."

Could you mention the company, or printer they used?

Re: Frankencamera

#12

Post by ukandy » Sat, May 16, 2015, 10:31 PM UTC

keithpeter wrote: post #3

uxp100 wrote: post #2

Cool. I've thought about this a lot, just because the UX of now cheap older cameras tends to be very good, for me at least, and the UX of the low end digital tends to be very eh. > $1000 bodies, it's a different story of course. It isn't exactly clear what I meant by UX; With my Minolta SRT 201, I can see Aperture and Shutter speed at a glance, modify them with a quick, dedicated, dial twist, have a distance scale on…

I've often daydreamed about a sub-unit that could fit in the back of a film camera and contain a sensor and some electronics. The sensor part would be thin enough to fit over the pressure plate and the electronics would be in the film can space along with a micro sd card for storage. The existing aperture/shutter would continue to control the light reaching the sensor. Basically digital film. That would be neat.

Google "silicon film" & "digipod" for a couple of attempts at exactly this.

Re: Frankencamera

#13

Post by billconan » Sat, May 16, 2015, 11:01 PM UTC

few years ago I had exactly the same idea. It's really great to see someone realized this.

I could imagine that this would be a great kick starter project. If there is a kit for me to do this, I will buy!

Re: Frankencamera

#14

Post by josephpmay » Sun, May 17, 2015, 1:28 AM UTC

marincounty wrote: post #11

"I first tried printing my design at school but the quality wasn’t high enough for such detailed work, so I sent my design to a 3-D printing company in London which used the incredible SLS printing method to create a strong, accurate and flexible print in nylon." Could you mention the company, or printer they used?

Well it was probably either a Stratasys or 3D systems machine. They basically have a duopoly on professional grade 3D printers.

Re: Frankencamera

#15

Post by geuis » Sun, May 17, 2015, 1:41 AM UTC

This is an excellent example of how not to use javascript on your site. If you look in the html, all the content is there. But nothing displays for many seconds while some js is waiting for something else to load.

Re: Frankencamera

#16

Post by dharma1 » Sun, May 17, 2015, 1:42 AM UTC

bah. Hoped this would be some kind of a neat large CMOS sensor/fpga/ARM SoC camera module which you can drop anywhere but basically it's just putting existing sony nex electronics inside an old camera body.

Re: Frankencamera

#17

Post by loosescrews » Sun, May 17, 2015, 3:42 AM UTC

There is a cool Stanford project that at least used to go by the same name:

https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/fcam/

http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/camera-2.0/

I use it on my Nokia N900.

Re: Frankencamera

#18

Post by yaleman » Sun, May 17, 2015, 4:01 AM UTC

This is cute, but I'm entirely sick of people who think "I want to do a cool thing for myself, can you fund it through kickstarter" is OK.

Re: Frankencamera

#19

Post by keithpeter » Sun, May 17, 2015, 7:35 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #9

keithpeter wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often daydreamed about a sub-unit that could fit in the back of a film camera and contain a sensor and some electronics. The sensor part would be thin enough to fit over the pressure plate and the electronics would be in the film can space along with a micro sd card for storage. The existing aperture/shutter would continue to control the light reaching the sensor. Basically digital film. That would be neat.

Back in the 90s, some of the first digital cameras weren't much more than that[1], with Kodak and such making ones for specific SLRs. The part that I never knew about until finding this article was that a company even tried the direct "drop in roll of film replacement" approach in the early 2000s, but they couldn't get it off the ground. [1] http://olivierduong.com/converting-film-cameras-to-digital-e...

Excellent find. Amazing but the crop factor was brutal.

Re: Frankencamera

#20

Post by jonah » Fri, May 22, 2015, 1:44 AM UTC

jonah wrote: post #7

keithpeter wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often daydreamed about a sub-unit that could fit in the back of a film camera and contain a sensor and some electronics. The sensor part would be thin enough to fit over the pressure plate and the electronics would be in the film can space along with a micro sd card for storage. The existing aperture/shutter would continue to control the light reaching the sensor. Basically digital film. That would be neat.

I recall someone proposing this and maybe even attempting to prototype this some years ago. Never worked. Maybe with more recent advances in the miniaturization of electronics and batteries it would be possible.

Several concepts are linked below. None in production of course.

http://petapixel.com/2012/12/17/nikon-patent-shows-a-back-fo...

http://petapixel.com/2011/04/08/another-concept-design-for-d...

http://petapixel.com/2013/08/16/convert-your-old-film-slr-in...