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Homemade Digital Cameras

Posted by samzenpus on Thu Jan 19, 2006 02:21 AM
from the lie-down-on-the-camera dept.
Hardware Hacking Technology
Michael Golembewski writes "For the past three years, I've been taking apart cheap secondhand flatbed scanners and turning them into homemade large format digital cameras. They are well over 100 mexapixel in resolution, and produce results that are both similar to and significantly different from traditional digital and conventional cameras."
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[+] Technology: Capturing 3D Surfaces Simply With a Flash Camera 131 comments
MojoKid writes with this excerpt from Hot Hardware (linking to a video demonstration): "Creating 3D maps and worlds can be extremely labor intensive and time consuming. Also, the final result might not be all that accurate or realistic. A new technique developed by scientists at The University of Manchester's School of Computer Science and Dolby Canada, however, might make capturing depth and textures for 3D surfaces as simple as shooting two pictures with a digital camera — one with flash and one without. First an image of a surface is captured without flash. The problem is that the different colors of a surface also reflect light differently, making it difficult to determine if the brightness difference is a function of depth or color. By taking a second photo with flash, however, the accurate colors of all visible portions of the surface can be captured. The two captured images essentially become a reflectance map (albedo) and a depth map (height field)."
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  • Amazing tech skills with art value! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dada21 (163177) * <adam.dada@gmail.com> on Thursday January 19 2006, @02:22AM (#14507593) Homepage Journal
    That is some eerie art! Is your initial part of your last name really pronounced "Golem" by chance?

    Very cool effects. When I read the snippet I figured this was going to be something like the old "Make an E-size scanner out of any hand scanner" fraud that was popular for a few years back in the old days (remember stitching manually on a Pentium 200, anyone?).

    For some reason I can't believe this works. I figured the scanning element (CCD) needed an intense amount of light to properly "read" an image on the bed.

    The fact that you use duct tape to get everything "light tight" put a good smile on my face, as well as the fact that you even got this working. If you're thinking of selling artwork, I'll be the first in line (the lady and I realized it's time for more photo-prints in the house). By the way, the image taken of the actual camera doesn't seem very high res. Was this by choice?

  • Analog hole (Score:5, Funny)

    by KiloByte (825081) on Thursday January 19 2006, @02:32AM (#14507623)
    Well, well. Since the quality exceeds those provided by "consumer-level" equipment, how are these guys going to deal with the Digital Transition Content Security Act?

  • Vacation (Score:3, Funny)

    by Frankie70 (803801) on Thursday January 19 2006, @02:34AM (#14507633)
    I will need a pickup truck to take this along on my next vacation.

  • Recycling in a Good Way (Score:5, Interesting)

    by core plexus (599119) on Thursday January 19 2006, @02:38AM (#14507653) Homepage
    This is a good idea for recycling old equipment. I have several of those laying around, and I'll make something useful to donate to our local schools.

    Opened a path to new computer technologies and related devices [suvalleynews.com]

    • This is a good idea for recycling old equipment. I have several of those laying around,

      Several of what? An old scanner is pretty useless without a decent lens with large area coverage, and a housing to mount it in. That's not exactly cheap. If you have old large format cameras or lenses just lying around, then getting a scanner is the least of your problems.

      I don't know about you, but I have Horseman 4x5 cameras coming out of my ass.

  • A Modern Salvador Dali (Score:5, Funny)

    by CarnivorousCoder (872609) on Thursday January 19 2006, @02:39AM (#14507656)
    Salvador Dali meets a camera. Brilliant stuff!

  • Brave guy (Score:5, Funny)

    by loraksus (171574) on Thursday January 19 2006, @02:41AM (#14507659) Homepage
    Sticking 25+ mb images on your server and submitting it for a slashdotting.
    Still, quite cool. He did a good job of describing the effects - made it informative, yet simple enough for most people to understand.

  • Time-lapse photo finishes (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kayamon (926543) on Thursday January 19 2006, @02:57AM (#14507710) Homepage
    This is kinda similar to the technology they use for doing photo-finishes in track & field races.

    See here - http://www.sportingworld.co.uk/newyearsprint/pics/ 2004/photofinish_75pc.jpg [sportingworld.co.uk]

    The best ones are when somebody puts their feet on the finishing line, and it gets stretched out to several "metres" long.

  • Argh! (Score:4, Informative)

    by HoneyBunchesOfGoats (619017) on Thursday January 19 2006, @02:57AM (#14507713)
    It seems he figured out how to script the camera to take continuous photos, and animated them into movies [scannerphotography.com]. Unfortunately, these movies require Flash 8 to play, and the latest Linux Flash Player is v7! This is the second site today that has kept me from viewing content because of this issue (though in this case it simply seems inadvertent; by contrast, you can't access any of animationmentor.com [animationmentor.com] with Linux).

  • 115 Megapixels? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lhk (196041) on Thursday January 19 2006, @03:10AM (#14507747)
    I find it hard to believe that he can get 115 megapixels out of that scanner. Since he is using a 4x5 camera, that works out to a scanner resolution of 2400dpi. That is the kind of resolution of high-end film scanners, not a cheap flatbed (whatever the marketing material says).

    lhk
    • The scanner he uses on his primary camera is 600x1200 dpi, so he's clearly not talking about that. (a full 8x10 scan would be 65 megapixels, but the 4x5 frame would only be about 15 megapixels) Kinda confusing as to why the images are so large then...that's not much bigger than my DSLR. Even a RAW image with my 8 megapixel camera is only about 8Megs.

        • Re:115 Megapixels? (Score:5, Informative)

          by bogado (25959) <<ten.odagob> <ta> <odagob>> on Thursday January 19 2006, @07:41AM (#14508395) Homepage Journal
          A raw image should have more then 8Megs, since each pixel has at least 3 bytes, but since many cameras that provide raw uses 16 bits per channel this would acount for 6 bytes per pixel. On the other hand, if your raw has the information direct from the ccd that usually is a black and white sensor that has a colored mask in front of it this would make each pixel to have a single channel (usually in an array of 4x4 squares that hold red and green in the first row and green and blue in the second).
          So in this configuration the raw file would hold 16Mb more or less. If this file is compressed with a non-lossy (gzip, zip, bz) compression it can be expected at least a 2x compression rate, so it would re-shrink it to 8Mb.

          So I guess that it is not that obvious that a 8Megapixel camera will have a 8Mbyte raw file, even if it seem obvious.

    • Re:115 Megapixels? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by markandrew (719634) on Thursday January 19 2006, @05:11AM (#14508045)
      Firstly, 2400dpi is not "high-end" for a film scanner. My Scan Dual III (several years old, and only GBP 200 new) has a 2820dpi resolution. That gives around a 10-mpixel image for 35mm film. You can get consumer scanners of 4000dpi and more for not much more than that. I know of at least one flatbed scanner [epson.co.uk] which is quite cheap and easily exceeds your supposed limit - and this from a person who has never bought a flatbed scanner in my life (there are sure to be many others). As for supposed "marketing" claims - I've yet to hear of a scanner which doesn't deliver the advertised resolution. They may not make full use of that resolution, and many high-res scanners may produce subjectively worse scans than lower-res scanners, but any scanner which advertises 2400dpi and only delivers 2200dpi would be false advertising, apart from anything else.

      Secondly, just because it is a 4x5 camera doesn't mean that the image being scanned is 4x5; if the scanner is placed behind the film-plane of the camera, the projected image size will increase. In fact, even if it is ON the film plane exactly, it's likely that there would be a (slightly) larger area than 4x5 inches available, as the projected image would be cropped to fit the rectangle of the film frame in normal use.

    • Take a look at the pictures again. Yup there are 115 Mega pixes for sure, but these are not numbers you can compare with your typical digital camara. This just a case of counting the pixels.

      You can see the scanning lines in a lot of the pictures and they are not a result of the art, but from techincal shortcomings. The time distortion effect is nice however.

  • Better than in Make for so far (Score:4, Interesting)

    by s0l3d4d (932623) on Thursday January 19 2006, @03:12AM (#14507753) Homepage
    Nice. My first thought was that it would be just one of the many how-to-make-your-own-digital-camera articles that have been around for ages at Make magazine and other similar media... so a lot nicer and more creative than that. And now I want to find an old, old camera, with an old flatbed scanner and try some of that stuff myself.

  • Dicomed digital camera back.. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2006, @03:15AM (#14507761)
    Back in the early 90's Dicomed introduced a digital camera back for 4x5 cameras for commercial use. It used the same theory, slap a scanner on the back of the camera. You had to use hot lamps, a studio environment and nothing could move. But the results were stunning, 100MB files that could easily be printed on the cover of a 150 line screen magazine. Wonderful.. What is really cool about your work is that you are celebrating all of the motion artifacts that studios were killing themselves to remove when using this technology. Your stuff is pretty creative and fun, and most importantly makes one look at the world differently.

  • My first digicam (Score:5, Interesting)

    by David Off (101038) on Thursday January 19 2006, @03:22AM (#14507784) Homepage
    Interesting project, it reminds me of the digital camera I built with a fellow student as a degree project. We ground the top of a 256 byte DRAM using a grinding machine in the mech.eng lab and fitted a glass window. The DRAM capacitors discharge at a different rate when exposed to light. We mounted the chip to a PCB, cut the back out of a 35mm Zenith camera and mounted the PCB. Obviously the optics and chip were poorly matched, we were only using a small part of the lens.

    Knowing the discharge rate of the DRAM and the time to load and scan all 256 elements you could get a black and white image. We used the camera for some image recognition work. One application was counting the number of cups remaining in a drinks machine hopper by edge detecting the image then counting the "lips" that we saw.

    That was back in the autumn of 1986. We've come a long way.

  • Open Source Makes It Work (Score:5, Interesting)

    by anagama (611277) <thepotter AT yahoo DOT com> on Thursday January 19 2006, @03:28AM (#14507797) Homepage
    Check out this: http://www.scannerphotography.com/cameras/software /index.html [scannerphotography.com]

    The scanner software that comes with the scanner he's presently using shuts the thing down if there are hardware faults. All his mods count as hardware faults thus making the shipped driver useless to him. He discusses a closed source pro driver which is a bit better, but still not perfect for his needs. Then explains how he uses SANE to make the thing actually work like he wants.
    The true usefulness of the SANE drivers lies not in the front-end applications, but rather in the fact that the raw code for the back-end is open source. ....I was able, with a bit of practice and programming study, to disable the calibration and error correction routines found in the driver for the Canon LIDE 20. This allowed me to use the more extensively modified scanners easily and effectively, and was vital in letting me create the higher quality photographs of the later-model scanner cameras.

    That's cool -- an artist embarks on getting enough programming language to modify a program so he can use it like he wants to. That's owning your hardware in the purest sense. And it's made possible by the community that generates all that great open source software.
      • I'm sure he already knew how to code. He probably just learned the new syntax/language specific to the project. I took 2 years of coding, and there's no way I learned enough to be doing what he did.

        Then you should ask for your money back; that's pathetic.

        TWW

  • Mexa-pixels? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 19 2006, @03:29AM (#14507800)
    "They are well over 100 mexapixel in resolution..."
    Does that mean each pixel can hold 100 mexicans worth of optical information?

  • Repeating History (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Betabug (58015) on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:17AM (#14507922) Homepage
    This seems to be actually repeating early developments in professional digital photography. The first digital backs for cameras like the Sinar, and the Arca Suisse were miniaturized flatbed scanners like that. Obviously they were really good only for still life. But still (back in 1992 or so) when I was in photographers school and we visited someone who had one of those backs, we managed a portrait of someone sitting very still. There were little smears where his breathing caused motion.

    Sadly we did not experiment with more motion. I think the "experimenting" with motion is the interesting part (as far as photography is concerned). Some of the pictures on the site are enjoyable. Hacking it all together yourself is interesting too, at least for us geeks.

    As for the comments in the style of "large format photography is only about the image quality"... it isn't exactly only about that. It is also about stuff like parallax control (putting buildings "upright" with parallel lines) and depth of field control (laying the plane of the depth of field folded through the scene in order to allow image to be sharp on other areas). All this can theoretically be achieved even with smaller formats, but due to mechanics it gets harder the smaller the format (Arca Suisse's 6x9cm cameras seem to be the smallest that still work very well, at least in my experience).

    Therefore the "experiments" done with this hack to in a line a bit with stuff like putting ordinary photographic paper into a large format camera or using polaroids for transfer prints. The "long exposure" part of it is also a reference to the times way back, when due to old processes like the daguerreotype, portrait subjects were held up with wire constructions. Very cool, all of this hack, congratulations.

  • Similar tinkering (Score:5, Informative)

    by Alkind (449960) on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:23AM (#14507940)
    Andrew Davidhazy has done similar things at the Imaging and Photographic Technology
    Rochester Institute of Technology years ago. His site is interesting

    http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/ [rit.edu]

    Many have done the same later on. I got through a Christmas period converting a Umax page scanner to a panorama scanner. It was fun.

    http://www.pigment-print.com/Panorama%20Camera%201 /index.html [pigment-print.com]

  • Mobile phone camera (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dimss (457848) on Thursday January 19 2006, @05:59AM (#14508148) Homepage
    This is somehow similar to mobile phone cameras. Some of them are very slow too:

    http://dimss.solutions.lv/samsung-phone-camera.htm l [solutions.lv]
  • I used scanners set to 4800DPI or higher for eXtr33m close-up photography of tiny chips - the depth of field was enough to get the whole thing in focus. The detail was amazing - the mold marks and casting flaws

    You have to set the scan area as small as possible.

    I had to prop the lid open a tiny bit, which left tiny shadows, as if the chips were floating above a white surface.

  • Amazing scanner use (Score:4, Funny)

    by digitaldc (879047) on Thursday January 19 2006, @07:45AM (#14508404)
    Site temporarily down - too many people looking! Sorry... I'll sort it out soon. Mike

    Is there anyway to disassemble a scanner to create a fast server?

  • Mirroring Help!!! (SITE'S BACK UP) (Score:5, Informative)

    by majk_g (947175) on Thursday January 19 2006, @10:43AM (#14509603)
    Well, I didn't expect that to happen... My bandwidth limit was drastically exceed this morning. As you know. Luckily, some great people have offered me a bit of help... so you can see the project again. I've put up a link on ww2w.scannerphotography.com Thanks so much for looking at my work... I hope you enjoy it! Mike Golembewski
    • If it's the look and effect you are going for, you can achieve that more easily with a regular digital camera and a bit of post-processing.

      I don't see hwo you'd do that without a lot of photoshop work (go and look at some of the fun distortions they get due to the way a scanner scans the image).
      • The grayscale, banding, and vignetting are easy.

        For the scanning effects, you take a video or continuous shooting (most digital cameras support both) and simulate the scanning by taking scanlines sequentially from successive frames.

        • Re:why not just post-process? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by lamasquerade (172547) * on Thursday January 19 2006, @02:50AM (#14507686)
          From TFS: "This effect is impossible to create to anything near this level of detail or clarity using traditional digital tools. This is because the refresh rate of a video camera is 25 frames per second, and the refresh rate of a digital stills camera is even slower - between one and three seconds per image. Scanner photographs are made up of 15,000 individual slices of time, spread over 15,000 lines. Using any standard video camera to capture images this way can be done, but is limited to 720 lines, and the fastest capture rate is 40 milliseconds. This means that the images will be much low resolution, and the slower capture rate leads to blocky, jagged edges between the frames of video that are used to make up the composite."

          So that's one point. But more broadly, it seems to me to be a bit more organic than using photoshop. He says the effect is reletively predictable, but given unpredictable environments, such as cars on a road, the picture could end up more interesting than anything you could concieve and then coerce into existance

          Finally, I really, really, really don't understand why these types of comments are made. Every bloody hack article there's some grim, sad comments about how the hack sucks because a) it could be done easier in some other way, b) it's 'pointless', c) it's 'try-hard', or whatever other reason. It's so infuriating - do you have any sense of exploration and experimentation? Or understand the desire to tell others about your experiences?

            • Re:why not just post-process? (Score:5, Insightful)

              by dangitman (862676) on Thursday January 19 2006, @03:25AM (#14507788)
              For fuck's sake. I've got a Horizont, several large-format cameras, and a Panoscan. I still think this is cool. Not everybody can afford the equipment I use, and none of it is exactly the same as this, anyway. Good art is still made with disposable cameras. Why have a chip on your shoulder about non-elitist equipment?

              • Re:why not just post-process? (Score:3, Informative)

                by Anonymous Coward
                Why have a chip on your shoulder about non-elitist equipment?

                I don't. I have a chip on my shoulder about people claiming something as artistically and/or technically new when it has been done numerous times before, and often better.

                Here [sentex.net] is one link. Here's [rit.edu] another one. There have been a number of other variations, including leaving the scanner in the film plane of a LF camera.

                • Re:why not just post-process? (Score:5, Insightful)

                  by dangitman (862676) on Thursday January 19 2006, @03:44AM (#14507847)
                  I don't. I have a chip on my shoulder about people claiming something as artistically and/or technically new when it has been done numerous times before, and often better.

                  But nobody claimed this. The article says:

                  "... and produce results that are both similar to and significantly different from traditional digital and conventional cameras."

                  The examples you provide are not provided by the standard use of traditional equipment. The article does not claim this effect has never been done before.

                  What do you mean by "better"? Art is very subjective, there is no absolute scale of goodness. Does it matter that Andy Warhol used mediums that many other people used?

            • The similarities with slit-scan photography immediately stood out to me as well.

              For anyone that's interested, there's a reasonably good page describing the technique here [rit.edu] and pages about it's application in the stargate sequence of 2001 here [seriss.com] and here [underview.com].

              It's possible to fake the technique in Adobe aftereffects with the time displacement filter too.

    • I can see you're not a photographer (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Flying pig (925874) on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:13AM (#14507910)
      The whole point of this kind of photography is that the equipment forces you to work and think in a different way. At that point, working with and against the equipment and conditions is what produces art. No amount of post processing or Photoshop is ever more than an artisanal job, which is why there is no Photoshop fine art.

      You'll find it in Goethe. I can't remember the original word for word, but in effect he says that without working within restrictions we never reach the highest levels of achievement; whoever wants to make something great must submit to the limitations of some medium. This guy has found a restricted medium that can be used to produce something like art. Arguments about megapixels are as irrelevant as arguments about how fine Renaissance artists could grind up their paint.

    • Erm, you miss the point... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by blorg (726186) on Thursday January 19 2006, @04:35AM (#14507975)
      Yeah, maybe he should just strap three of these [hasselbladusa.com] together and post-process in Photoshop.

      Well, post-processing actually only works on the image you have in front of you. Given that the scanner exposes individual lines in the image over time (e.g. it - "scans") to generate the end image, you would actually need a movie to be able to generate the same effect with post-processing. A movie with very high-quality frames, and an unbelievably high frame rate (effectively you would want a frame for each line, so depending on the scan speed up to perhaps a few thousand frames a second - and then you would throw out the entire frame except the single line you wanted.) The scanner idea is starting to sound better to me.

      On a more general note, this whole attitude is endemic now. Sure you can correct stuff later, but it is generally better in photography to try to get the best image you can at the moment you are taking it; you've then have got a lot more to work with! The phrase "polishing a turd" comes to mind...
      • If you rtfa it's because the distortion from a camera like this is because it captures the image in a series of scan lines, each scanline is a small

        But it is the same way existing digital line cameras work, and it's the same way film-based line cameras work, yielding, not surprisingly, the same effects.

        It's an original idea,

        No, it's not. Even the consumer-scanner-as-large-format-camera is old.

        I'd be interested to see if color filters on the lens would allow you to take multiple exposures for red/green/blue
    • I'd love to try some high res landscapes though

      If you want to do landscape photography with this, then you've missed the point entirely. =P (Unless you're talking about clouds or something)

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