Whoa… Big news on the camera patent scouting front today: Nikon appears to be tinkering with the idea with creating a special 35mm SLR replacement back that would turn a film camera into a digital camera!
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One of the biggest hits this past April Fool’s Day was RE-35, a futuristic cartridge that transforms any 35mm film camera into a digital one. As the website went viral, many people actually thought it was a real product, prompting the design company behind the design to issue a notice on the website explaining that it was fake. As stated by numerous readers, digital film isn’t exactly a new idea — an actual company called Silicon Film attempted this product about a decade ago (and even gave a demo at PMA 2001) but ran into “storage, battery, environment and sensor size limitations“.

Judging from the response to this April Fool’s Prank, however, it’s pretty clear that this is an idea that would be enormously popular with photographers if it were to actually exist and perform reasonably well. The above illustration is another concept design for “digital film”, created by students of Hongik University for the iF Design Awards this year.
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