A photographer made a DIY medium format digital camera from an Epson flatbed scanner and took a 514-megapixel picture with it.
Ryan Kojima explains petapixel He mentioned that his challenge shouldn’t be new and that he first made the Frankenstein digital camera 10 years in the past. Nonetheless, it just lately took an increasing number of efficiency out of it, capturing a 514-megapixel picture.
“The digital camera principally works like an everyday scanner,” says Kojima, who was the primary to show an Epson CCD scanner right into a digital digital camera.
“The unique scanner makes use of an x5 lens to downsize an A4 picture to challenge it onto the CCD sensor.
“Linear CCD sensor size is roughly 45mm. I eliminated the lens, put it on the linear slider and added gears to scale back the velocity to 1/5.
“The digital camera’s lens mount is a Mamiya 645. Lens high quality shouldn’t be dangerous and likewise lenses are low cost for medium format lenses.”
Within the YouTube video above from early 2022, Kojima explains that he first made his do-it-yourself scanner digital camera again in 2011.
“It makes use of a linear CCD relatively than a discipline CCD,” he says.
A linear CCD strikes whereas recording a photograph, which suggests the topic should stay nonetheless.
“The benefit of utilizing a linear CCD is that it could actually seize a a lot bigger discipline of view with out being too large a CCD,” says Kojima.
“My scanner digital camera can shoot at about the identical measurement as a 645 medium format movie, which remains to be thought of a high-end digital camera at present.”
Because of the enhancements in his laptop, Kojima tried to take photos at an incredible velocity of 4,800 dots per inch (DPI). The ensuing file was two gigapixels, making it tough to edit in Photoshop. So it downgraded to 1,200 DPI and the file got here out at 514 megapixels.
The ensuing photograph could be considered in all its glory Here.
Linear CCD and Space CCD
Kojima says discipline CCD sensors do not truly seize true-color pixels.
“Every pixel can seize just one channel, purple, inexperienced or blue. The digital sign processor makes use of neighboring pixels to calculate the values of different channels. That is known as interpolation.
Alternatively, linear CCD will seize the pixel thrice for every channel. In consequence, linear CCD can seize ‘true’ shade versus space CCD.”
However Kojima says the drawback of a linear CCD is that it “may be very sluggish and might solely seize stationary objects.”
Cheats and Tips
Kojima says making the scanner was lots of trial and error.
“It is not designed to take photographs from pure mild,” he says. “I needed to do some tips to trick the browser to keep away from startup errors.”
These tips embody including different {hardware} to decelerate the CCD and putting in a lightbox to trick the scanner’s firmware.
Kojima provides that he hopes Epson will launch the legacy firmware supply code. As a software program engineer, he can add publicity controls to the DIY digital camera.
Extra photographs of Kojima could be seen on his web page. flickr.
Picture credit score: All photographs courtesy of Ryan Kojima.
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