A photographer constructed a DIY medium format digicam from an Epson flatbed scanner and shot a 514-megapixel image with it.
Ryan Kojima tells PetaPixel that his mission shouldn’t be new and first constructed the Frankenstein digicam 10 years in the past. Nevertheless, he has extracted increasingly efficiency from it, just lately capturing a 514-megapixel picture.
Kojima, the primary individual to ever convert an Epson CCD scanner right into a digital digicam, says: “The digicam works as a standard scanner principally.
“The unique scanner makes use of an x5 lens to shrink down an A4 picture to mission a picture to the CCD sensor.
“The linear CCD sensor size is about 45mm. I eliminated the lens, put it on a linear slider, and added gears to cut back velocity to 1/5.
“The digicam’s lens mount is a Mamiya 645. Their lens high quality shouldn’t be dangerous and in addition the lenses are low cost for medium format lenses.”
Within the above YouTube video from early 2022, Kojima explains he first made his DIY scanner digicam again in 2011.
“It makes use of a linear CCD as a substitute of an space CCD,” he says.
A linear CCD strikes whereas it’s recording a photograph, that means that the topic should stay nonetheless.
“The benefit of utilizing a linear CCD is that it could actually seize a a lot bigger picture space with out having a large CCD,” says Kojima.
“My scanner digicam can seize about the identical dimension as a 645 medium format movie, that’s nonetheless thought-about a high-end digicam at the moment.”
Due to enhancements to his PC, Kojima tried to shoot a photograph at an unlimited 4,800 dots per inch (DPI). The ensuing file was two gigapixels, making it tough to edit in Photoshop. So he scaled it all the way down to 1,200 DPI and the file got here out at 514 megapixels.
The ensuing picture could be considered in all of its glory right here.
Linear CCD vs Space CCD
Kojima says that space CCD sensors don’t truly seize true colour pixels.
“Every pixel can seize just one channel, which is pink, inexperienced, or blue. The digital sign processor calculates different channels’ values by utilizing neighborhood pixels. That is known as interpolation.
“Then again, linear CCD will seize the pixel 3 times for every channel. Consequently, linear CCD can seize ‘true’ colour, in contrast to space CCD.”
Nevertheless, Kojima says the drawback of a linear CCD is that it’s “ultra-slow and it could actually solely seize nonetheless objects.”
Gimmicks and Methods
Kojima says that making the scanner was numerous trial and error.
“It’s not designed to seize photos from pure gentle,” he says. “I wanted to make some gimmicks to trick the scanner to keep away from initialization errors.”
These gimmicks embrace including one other gear to cut back the CCD’s velocity and putting in a lightbox to trick the scanner’s firmware.
Kojima provides that he hopes Epson may launch the previous firmware supply code. As a result of he’s a software program engineer, he might add publicity controls to his DIY digicam.
Extra of Kojima’s pictures could be considered on his Flickr.
Picture credit: All pictures by Ryan Kojima.
