How do you get better pictures from a 20+ year old Game Boy Camera? How about marrying a DSLR lens to it? That’s what [ConorSev] did and, honestly, the results are better than you might expect as [John Aldred] mentioned in his post about the topic. You can check the camera out in the video below.
A 3D printed adapter lets you mount a Canon EF lens to the Game Boy Camera, a trick that we’ve seen in the past. [ConorSev] looked at the existing adapters floating around, and came up with the revised version you see here. There was still the problem of actually getting the images off the Camera cartridge, but luckily, this isn’t exactly unexplored territory either.
While there might not be anything new with this project, using a high-quality lens on the toy makes for some interesting photographs, and you wonder how far you can push this whole idea. Of course, no matter how much of a lens you put on the front, you still have to contend with the original image sensor which has hardly well. Still, we were impressed at how much better things looked with a high-quality zoom lens.
We bet the original designer of the Game Boy Camera never imagined it would have the kind of zoom capability you can see in the video. We love seeing these little handhelds pushed beyond their limits. Cryptomining? No problem. Morse code? Piece of cake.
I think pepole like him should be put on some kind of special scholarship so no need to work because pepole like him will be nesesary to restart our civilization when it becomes very damaged (destroyed).
There is no evidence to suggest that civilization will need to be restarted. Humans are extremely well distributed across this planet.
You are seriously conflating pockets of people with civilization?
Civilization (as we know it) is always only 3 days worth of food from something we don’t presently consider to be “civilization”. We all need technology and stable energy supplies now to maintain the current level of development.
Scholarship would be nice, but if you don’t do anything, your skills eventually die, so the effect would b exactly the opposite
he attached a lens to a camera
This is so dumb. I love it.
What is the round thing on the table next to the Gameboy at 1:59?
It was interesting that he said the zoom lens was less focused in its center range.
I don’t know enough about lens to understand why.
The lens might not be parfocal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parfocal_lens
Like JP says, not parfocal.
Could be that he just messed up with the flange distance.
The often-misunderstood back focus is important here.
(not the ‘back focus’ as mis-used by Canon complainers and other blurred-concept folks, the real back focus, as described here: https://www.mediacollege.com/video/camera/focus/back-focus.html )
Thank you!
It’s a 1965 honda s600 diff housing from the car I’m restoring with a empty 3D printed plastic spool ontop of it.
Interesting… unlike many retro-hacks, there’s nothing which couldn’t have been done when the game boy was first released (machining the adaptor would have been more time-consuming than 3D printing, but doable, and something simpler would have been possible… even a black-bag and hand-hold it like a ghetto tilt-shift.)
So is this really the first time someone’s done it?
What are the hacks that in 20 years someone will be doing with our current toys and tech?
“So is this really the first time someone’s done it?”
IIRC, he said in the video that both the cable hack and some sort of lens adapter have been done before. Maybe this is the first time both have been done.
I think you could use one of those stratasys printers back in the 90s
The camera itself is quite interesting, in that the interface is sort of like an analog shift register. You can’t change the resolution, but you could probably improve the image quality by using a high-quality ADC to directly sample the signal from the camera module rather than going through whatever ADC the cartridge uses.
I wonder if you can change the exposure time without much change in the hardware. You could take multiple pictures with different exposure settings and create an HDR image. Or change the brightness of the light source., that would not require any change in hardware.
I have experimented with this an can confirm that the dynamic range is much improved with a good adc. Also similar to this article have made an adapter to replace lenses with the disc cameras, and Pentax 110 system lenses, as the film frame size more closely matches the sensor size and result is less crop factor.. really should document some time. This is a really old link, have updated the camera since. But it’s the best one I could find of it while away from studio! https://www.instagram.com/p/Bowg3XIllG-/?utm_medium=copy_link
Love this kinda of lofi messing :)
Broken link.
Works fine here:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bowg3XIllG-
This is like putting a rubber band gun on a machine gun mount, crazy but kinda neat.
The canon efs 18-55mm kit lens is not a “ridiculously good lens.” It’s pretty cheap and sometimes doesn’t even properly match the body it comes with, causing constant back focusing. It’s not even the cheapest lens I have, but it’s definitely the worst. Also, without a before and after mod pic, how can we know there was actually any improvement?
Well it is ridiculously good for a Gameboy camera, don’t you think?
The canon efs 18-55mm kit lens is not a “ridiculously good lens.”
That lens is pretty cheap and sometimes doesn’t even properly match the body it comes with, causing constant back focusing. It’s not even the cheapest lens I have, but it’s definitely the worst. Also, without a before and after mod pic, how can we know there was actually any improvement?
Your camera has autofocus, right? How can the lens be responsible for mis-focusing (what you probably really mean by ‘back focusing’) if the focus is entirely under control of the camera?