digital camera

58 Articles

An open-source, DIY, point-and-shoot digital camera.

PolyShot Camera Focuses On Nostalgia

August 18, 2026 by 8 Comments

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.

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The PiShot Is Ready For Your Snaps

August 10, 2026 by 4 Comments

The formula for a Raspberry Pi camera is by now a straightforward one: take a Pi and camera module, add a display, buttons, and battery, and you’re done. This doesn’t mean that there’s no scope for more though, and [Irtaza2009] has one in the PiShot. It’s a few months old now but the repository is still being updated.

The 3D printed case follows a compact camera form factor with the screen on the rear, and a cold shoe on top. Inside is a Pi Zero 2 W and a Camera Module 3, with an 18650 cell and battery management/power supply board. The buttons are tactile switches hooked up to GPIOs, and the screen is an ST7789 SPI display.

For software there’s a Python script, which should do the job. We’ve not tested this one, but our experience is that slowness is the Achilles’ heel of Python based Pi cameras. We hope this one has managed to eke out some performance.

An interesting upgrade to this device would be to use an HQ camera module, for a mirror-less compact. It wouldn’t be the first such camera we’ve seen.

A Raspberry Pi Zero-based camera in a nice yellow case. There's a yellow lanyard, too.

Optocam Zero’s Pictures Look One Hundred

April 16, 2026 by 12 Comments

Yeah, we know, there’s a camera on your phone that does this and that. But these days its become trendy to turn towards older digital cameras in place of smartphones, and we can tell you from experience, that the joys of having a dedicated photographing contraption are many.

There’s plenty of cheap digital cameras on the secondhand market, but instead of fending off the clothes bros and other reseller types at the thrift store, stay home and build [Doruk Kumkumoğlu]’s Optocam Zero. Inspired by the Kodak Charmera and the like, [Doruk] aimed for something that’s playful, enjoyable, and intuitive to use.

Optocam Zero uses an auto-focus camera module and features eight photo filters. The screen dims when inactive to preserve battery life, but it can be charged back up with USB-C, and you can use it for the duration. And unlike my young adult camera, you don’t have to take out the SD card to see the pictures, just use the custom hotspot interface to transfer them.

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Experiment With The Pi Camera The Modular Way

March 8, 2026 by 6 Comments

The various Raspberry Pi camera modules have become the default digital camera hacker’s tool, and have appeared in a huge number of designs over the past decade. They’re versatile and affordable, and while the software can sometimes be a little slow, they’re also of decent enough quality for the investment. Making a Pi camera can be annoying though, because different screens, lenses, and modules have their own mounting requirements. [Jacob David C Cunningham] has a solution here, with a modular Raspberry Pi camera, as an experimentation platform for different screens and lenses.

It takes the form of a central unit that holds the Pi and its support components, and front and rear modules for the screens or displays. Examples are given using the HQ and non-HQ modules, as well as with round or rectangular displays.

When designing a camera for 3D printing it’s a very difficult task, to replicate or exceed the industrial design of commercial cameras. Few succeed, and we’d include ourselves among that number. But this one comes close; it looks like a camera we’d like to use. We like it.

Kodak MC3: Everything But A Phone In 2001

February 8, 2026 by 15 Comments

One of the constants in consumer electronics is that designers will try to put as many features into a single device as possible, whether it’s a Walkman with a radio tuner or a new class of devices that crams a photo and video camera in the same enclosure as a music player. At the time that the Kodak MC3 was released this made it a rather unique device, with it in hindsight being basically a smartphone without the phone, as [Tech Tangents] aptly notes in his recent video on the device.

Six years before Apple’s iPhone would be announced, and eight years before the first iPod with a video camera, the Kodak MC3 was in many respects bleeding edge technology targeted straight at tech enthusiasts. For less than $300 you got VGA-quality images, CompactFlash storage, and MP3 playback capability. The videos it produced were 320×240 resolution, h.263 encoded MOVs with a maximum length of 4 seconds at 20 FPS, or 4 minutes with a 64 MB CF card.

The unit that [Tech Tangents] got used came with a 128 MB CF card, but couldn’t use a 2 GB CF card, which is a shame. The screen on it got a lot of flak for not not having a backlight, but this was common for the era, as were the poor viewing angles. Ditto for the poor video quality, as anyone who invested in consumer digital cameras in the early 2000s can attest to. In that respect this Kodak device was probably a bit too ambitious with its features for the era, maybe to compensate for it completely missing the boat on the rise of digital camera technology around the time.

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The Surprising Hackability Of A Knock-Off Chinese Toy Camera

February 3, 2026 by 11 Comments

My colleague Lewin on the other side of the world has recently bought himself a new camera. It’s a very cute little thing, a Kodak Charmera, the latest badge-engineered device to carry the venerable photography company’s name. It’s a keyring camera, not much bigger than my thumb, and packing a few-megapixel sensor and a little fixed-focus camera module. They’re all the rage and thus always sold out, so when I saw something similar on AliExpress for just under a tenner I was curious enough to drop in an order. How bad could it be?

A Blatant-Knock-Off With Interesting Internals

My G6 Thumb Camera arrived a few days later, as straightforward a copy of a branded product as I have seen, and while it’s by any measure not a high quality camera, I am pleasantly surprised how bad it isn’t. I’ve received a three megapixel camera with image and movie quality that’s far better than that of the kids toy cameras I’ve played with before at a similar price, and that’s something I find amazing. This isn’t a review of a cheap camera, instead it’s an investigation of what goes into a camera like this one. How can they make a camera that’s almost useful, for under a tenner? Continue reading “The Surprising Hackability Of A Knock-Off Chinese Toy Camera” →

It’s Not A Leica, It’s A Lumix

January 8, 2026 by 15 Comments

There’s an old adage in photography that the best camera in the world is the one in your hand when the shot presents itself, but there’s no doubt that a better camera makes a difference to the quality of the final image. Among decent quality cameras the Leica rangefinder models have near cult-like status, but the problem is for would-be Leica owners that they carry eye-watering prices. [Cristian Băluță] approached this problem in s special way, by crafting a Leica-style body for a Panasonic Lumix camera. Given the technology relationship between the Japanese and German companies, we can see the appeal.

While the aesthetics of a Leica are an important consideration, the ergonomics such as the position of the lens on the body dictated the design choices. He was fortunate that the internal design of the Lumix gave plenty of scope for re-arrangement of parts, given that cameras are often extremely packed internally. Some rather bold surgery to the Lumix mainboard and a set of redesigned flex PCBs result in all the parts fitting in the CNC machined case, and the resulting camera certainly looks the part.

The write-up is in part a journey through discovering the process of getting parts manufactured, but it contains a lot of impressive work. Does the performance of the final result match up to its looks? We’ll leave you to be the judge of that. Meanwhile, take a look at another Leica clone.