Super-Cool DIY Digital Instant Camera ‘Prints’ Photos On Reusable Cartridges
Strange Inventions Lab has designed a custom instant camera that uses full-color e-paper displays as physical “digital film,” and it’s awesome.
Digital photos are very convenient, but they are often lost as soon as they are captured, destined to become 1s and 0s on a hard drive somewhere.
Strange Inventions is the brainchild of Dutch engineer and maker Jens, who has shared many incredible projects on his YouTube channel. One recent creation that might also appeal to photographers is “the world’s first sketch camera.”
“I wanted something physical again without actually printing anything,” Strange Inventions explains.
This desire has made instant cameras extremely popular, although beloved cameras from companies like Fujifilm Instax and Polaroid require consumable instant film. That adds a regular operational cost to actually capturing photos, which can understandably put some people off.
The solution is a DIY instant camera that captures photos and records them to reusable e-paper display cartridges, like a digital version of an Instax print that is both convenient and tangible.
The DIY digital instant camera is built around a Raspberry Pi 3 A+, a 5-megapixel camera module, and relatively cheap 1.54-inch e-paper displays. The Raspberry Pi and camera module go inside a 3D-printed camera body. On the back of the camera is a cartridge slot for the 3D-printed “digital film,” which slides into the camera like an old Game Boy game.
Strange Inventions describes the project as “intermediate difficulty” and says the complete build costs around €127 with six photo cartridges. The full build list and the required files are available on Strange Inventions Lab’s website for €24, or about $32.
The e-paper Strange Inventions used can only display black, white, red, and yellow, so he also developed a custom image-processing pipeline to make photos look “good.” Basically, colors in the digital photo must be remapped to these four channels, and the camera lets the photographer choose between dithered and undithered shooting modes.
As the video at the top shows, the images certainly don’t look like typical color photos, but they undeniably have a certain charm. These reusable cartridges also don’t require batteries, which is a very neat bonus, and they are ready for display.
All the files for the “Camera with Digital Film” are available to purchase online now.
Image creditsStrange Inventions Lab
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