Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The unarguable benefits of digital photography has rendered the analog SLR obsolete for most purposes. This means that a wide selection of cameras and lenses are available on the second hand market for pennies on the dollar, making them ripe targets for hacking. [drtonis] decided to experiment with a quick and easy digital conversion to an old Canon A-1, and it’s got us excited about the possibilities.
It’s a simple hack, but a fun one. The SLR is opened up, and the spring plate for holding the film is removed. A Raspberry Pi camera then has its original lens removed, and is placed inside the film compartment. It’s held in with electrical tape, upon a 3mm shim to space it correctly to work with the original optics.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 16 2019, @10:06PM (3 children)
There's several products that convert film SLRs to digital. One is called electronic film and sits in the film cassette bay with a digital pickup laying across the film bay. These were around 10 years ago.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 17 2019, @01:25AM (2 children)
There were digital backs over 20 years ago, camera manufacturers decided it would be more profitable to sell an entire new camera.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday November 17 2019, @03:24AM
It was really consumers that decided that hacking up an old camera at a significant fraction of the cost of a new digital one to get a frankenstein not-really-digital made a lot less sense than just buying a purpose-built digital in the first place. This was at best a very, very niche product. Now it's just a curiosity.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday November 17 2019, @11:28AM
There are massive technical problems with fitting a digital back to a film camera (even assuming the back is interchangeable in the first place) if you want more than an extrememly basic and awkward-to-use camera. Digital backs on cameras designed for film are really confined to medium or large format studio use where there is time for setting things up.
Manufacturers always were introducing new cameras anyway. Even in film days it was rare for a consumer grade camera to be produced for more than a couple of years (professional cameras lasted longer - the Nikon F3 and Pentax LX both went 20 years). So why not produce digital one when the tech became avaialble?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Appalbarry on Saturday November 16 2019, @10:25PM (4 children)
The claim that digital made film cameras "obsolete" is more than a bit debatable. No doubt the poster also believes that MP3s made vinyl and CDs "obsolete."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 16 2019, @10:54PM (1 child)
And my 40 year old 50mm f1.2, 55mm f1.2, and an f44 lens originally for film SLRs still fit my digital SLR.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Nuke on Sunday November 17 2019, @11:30AM
LoL! Pinhole lens?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Bot on Saturday November 16 2019, @11:21PM
The availability of film is something to keep in mind though. 35mm rolls will be produced but rarer formats are gonna be SOL.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday November 17 2019, @11:08AM
Indeed. The claim that "a wide selection of cameras and lenses are available on the second hand market for pennies on the dollar" is misleading. Quality film cameras are holding their prices well, although you can always find cheap crap like Zenith. Some, like the Pentax K1000, if in good nick sell for up to twice the ticket price they had when new (I've seen insane prices), although that is mainly nostalgia as they were invariably recommended for art students.
(Score: 4, Informative) by VLM on Saturday November 16 2019, @11:23PM (5 children)
I'm a little confused about the optics, isn't the cam sensor microscopic compared to 35mm film so everything would be like 1000x zoom?
Now maybe a smaller format like 110 cartridge... I had a 110 film camera in the 80s. It gave very ... cellphone quality ... photos, but did work. And was tiny.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday November 16 2019, @11:43PM
Yep, the notorious "crop factor" will be huge.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 16 2019, @11:55PM (3 children)
The crop factor is only around 1.6x
My old film lenses are just fine with a 1.6x crop
(Score: 3, Informative) by ChrisMaple on Sunday November 17 2019, @06:12AM
The Raspberry Pi camera sensor is about 3.7 x 2.7 mm. The size of a full frame 35 mm camera image is 36 mm x 24 mm. That's about a 9:1 crop factor. Without going into all the details, it's going to provide poor quality with even the best 35 mm camera lenses ever made.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday November 17 2019, @10:30AM
So you have tried this idea have you? Thought not.
The crop factor of 1.6 is about the factor you get using a 35mm film lens (strictly speaking a lens for the 135 format) with an APS format camera - which most DSLRs are. That is quite often done by people utilising old lenses. As someone else said, the crop factor of a Raspberry Pi sensor in a 135 format camera is huge.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday November 17 2019, @02:46PM
Interestingly thats the crop factor for my EOS 7D, AC must own Canon products. They're nice, aren't they AC? Other brands are all over the map.
For fun I was motivated yesterday to look for APS sensor breakout board and such as you'd think camera hackers would want some kind of raspi/arduino breakout of a fine sensor for camera hacking. There's nothing. I suppose that's theoretically a side business opportunity for me, although I donno if I'd sell more than like 3 of them, LOL. You'd think someone would have stuck an APS sensor on a pi-hat breakout for camera hacking, but there's nothing. I own some low res IR sensors on breakout boards (like 8x8 pixels) and its pretty cool. Of course "its cool to F around" might sell at $50 for IR imager but not sell so well at maybe $200 retail for an APS sensor breakout.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Bot on Saturday November 16 2019, @11:34PM (7 children)
Concerning the lenses you can sure be lucky and pick some vintage optics for pennies on the dollar, but they are usually sold at a price reflecting their quality/rarity, now that people realized that with a cheap adapter mirrorless cams can use most mounts (even video mounts, think the C mount from a discarded security camera) and DSLRs can use the ones with enough flange distance.
I still recommend trying out vintage lenses though, new ones are "too good", good contrast, saturation, no flare. Also some of their defects can be adjusted digitally to taste.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by EvilSS on Saturday November 16 2019, @11:50PM (6 children)
(Score: 2) by Fnord666 on Sunday November 17 2019, @01:07AM (3 children)
Same with the EF mounts for Canon. I run a number of my old SLR lenses on my current Canon DSLR with no issues.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 17 2019, @01:30AM (1 child)
Yeah...good luck getting some L glass for pennies on the dollar.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 17 2019, @01:43AM
Go fuck yourself.
Bet you're glad RMS got cancled for "paedophillia apologism"
Bet you're even happier he recanted, and is now standing in no-mans land.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday November 17 2019, @03:33AM
EF mount hasn't been around as long as the Nikon one but on the plus side it doesn't require a motor inside the camera to work the lens. Although on a camera with minimal support for recording video, having a non-Canon lens with only manual aperture control seems to come in handy.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday November 17 2019, @10:58AM (1 child)
Same with Pentax. Unlike some of the other SLR makers, Pentax went out of their way to make their DSLRs compatible with their older K-mount film lenses, probably because they did not have the resources (as Canon and Nikon did) to introduce a full range of digital lenses all at once at the time. You can meter and use focus assist with the old lenses and the anti-shake works because it is in the camera, not in the lenses.
Nikon are the next best with supporting their older lenses, and Canon are the worst. Canon pissed off their users anyway back in the film days (late 80's) by changing their lens mounts, and today they go out of their way to make their APS format lenses unmountable on their 135 (or digital "Full-Frame") bodies, denying the user the option of cropping in post-processing.
I might be wrong, but I don't think any of the other 35mm camera makers made any attempt to allow their older lenses to be used on their digital cameras, if they made them at all.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 17 2019, @11:26AM
Leica - your dentist will confirm.
(Score: 2) by jelizondo on Sunday November 17 2019, @01:47AM (2 children)
Isn't like adding milk to coffee? Ruins the coffee and ruins the milk. :-)
Why add a probably not very good digital camera to a probably very good film camera?
If you want digital, there is plenty of very good ones out there; the same goes for SLR.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Sunday November 17 2019, @06:17AM
To the best of my knowledge, there are no fixed-mirror digital cameras comparable to the film Canon Pellix or EOS RT. I would love such a camera.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 17 2019, @08:02AM
I agree about the quality of the digital camera, not the best, and yes, the film camera might be very good, but do a quick trawl of the usual online secondhand/used souks, there are a hell of a lot of very good film cameras out there to be had for ridiculously small sums, in fact, if you ask around you might end up with both bodies, glass and ancillary equipment for free (I'm not a Nikon man, but was once given a whole bag of expensive back-in-the-day Nikon flash gear gratis when purchasing some old Minolta and Olympus glass, and I've had old camera bodies in various states of usability thrown in for free when purchasing lenses..)
It might be sacrilege, but I'd rather someone frankensteined this old gear, even if only for the gits and shiggles, than see it just being scrapped.
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Sunday November 17 2019, @05:45AM (2 children)
Looks like he just tapes the original shutter and mirror out of the way, and sticks the Raspberry Pi where the film would go. So it's really just a light-tight box with a mount to hold a lens on front. You can't even use the original viewfinder anymore because the mirror is in the way, and you're not using the camera's shutter either. I'm also not sure how he's controlling the aperture in the lens either, maybe the A-1 has a DOF preview function. A more interesting hack would be to use a SLR with a mirror lockup feature (I don't know if the A-1 has that), so that you can flip the mirror down and look through the viewfinder, then flip the mirror up to take your picture.
Of course, he could accomplish the same thing without the SLR. Just build a light-tight box with the camera sensor inside of it, that can mount the lens out front. I did something like that back in the analog days when I had access to a darkroom. I cut a hole into a black plastic VHS cassette box that I could mount a lens on, and inside the cassette box I could tape a piece of positive photo paper to the back. Seal it up all good, and I now had a camera. Photo paper is pretty slow - something like ISO 6, so I could use the lens cap as the shutter and a tripod was mandatory. Of course, it was a single shot only and it was back to the darkroom to develop the image. It obviously wasn't super useful but it was a fun little project.
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Sunday November 17 2019, @11:37AM (1 child)
Like an RPi camera, you mean?
(Score: 2) by toddestan on Sunday November 17 2019, @07:33PM
Exactly, though I might consider just getting a sensor so I wouldn't have to tear apart a RPI camera, though I assume the RPI camera is cheap and interfacing to it is easy.