Although we personally have yet to see anyone brandishing an old digital point-and-shoot camera, we hear they’re back in vogue. Why, though? People are nostalgic for that image quality. While he certainly could have simply picked up a vintage model somewhere for a likely inflated price, [Arnov Sharma] decided to build his own version and call it the PolyShot.
The core of this project is the Unihiker K10 dev board, which uses an ESP32-S3, a whopping 2 megapixel camera, and a micro SD card to capture photos and display them back on the screen. The tricky part, if you can call it that, is the custom PCB. It’s a simple board with just three buttons: shutter, gallery, and next image. We do like that the position of the battery compartment creates a nice grip.
The biggest difference here is that there is a few-second delay between pressing the shutter button and actually capturing the image, which you can see in the short videos below. So if you’re trying to get a shot of a skink or something equally speedy, we wish you good luck.
In a future iteration, [Arnov] wants to address the issue of image quality, because this project ended up evolving into a more traditional digital camera. He would also improve the battery life, for which the current expectancy is around three hours on a charge. Ultimately, [Arnov] wants to ditch the Unihiker and design everything from the ground up, using an ESP32-S3 module.
I suspect it isn’t really the image quality – people are more nostalgic for camera that actually do their best to capture what you are looking at honestly, perhaps with a side order of cheap and easy enough for anybody to use in a way the SLR type more professional camera tend not to be (or at least seem it – they are actually pretty easy to get started with and cheap to get into too! You’ll get better than smartphone can really hope to do quality and more control of the artistic parts of image creation from from a 20 year old SLR with the kit lens it came with…
Modern smartphones are so heavily processed and the images from them so common that it has no artistry and just looks like AI slop, as it makes up the bulk of the AI slop data sets. Where that hugely obsolete SLR with with paltry handful of pixels BUT a real lens….
Wide absolute apertures for targeted depth of field without unnatural fake bokeh is where ILCs of all sorts really shine. Even some point-and-shoots probably do better than phones in that regard.
welp i’m old enough to remember how once upon a time there was a mania for tilt-shift videos on youtube
For screens
https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-ultimate-flexible-screens-brightness-redesigned.html
okay, cool I guess, but how does this relate to the posted project?!?!
Is the purpose of this kind of projects nowadays mainly:
– get that shot with funny placement of wireless microphone?
– “sponsorship” with PCBWay?
Good points you mentioned there. What is it that people are sticking a perfectly good microphone onto inappropriate objects. Sure I get the joke if the item the microphone is placed upon changes in every shot (like a really really bad continuity mistake). But why, it’s a clip on mike, clip it on your shirt like it is intended so that at least the sound quality is continuous.
Regarding PCB way… they promise to give you a free PCB if you sell your soul by devoting a considerable part of your video to mention how great and versatile their company is. And PCB way is aggressively emailing everyone with a history of PCB related projects in a YouTube video, sure it’s smart of the company, but it makes all project related videos look the same to the point where the viewer looks at it with: … ahh another PCB way add… here we go again… double tappin the screen to skip +10sec, double tap again and again, ohh… still not far enough… +10 +10 +10 oops now I’m too far, hmmm… missed a vital part of the video… nehh… don’t care. Now that reaction could not have been the goal of making the video, would it, and for what? A set of free PCBs worth $10 ?!?! It’s all really sad actually.
I had an old Kodak years ago that took way better pictures with its humble 4 megapixels than I ever got with a phone camera.