scanner camera

4 Articles

Medium Format, 3 GigaPixel Camera Puts It All On The Line (Sensor)

November 7, 2025 by 18 Comments

It’s a bit of a truism that bigger sensors lead to better pictures when it comes to photography. Of course everyone who isn’t a photographer knows that moar megapixles is moar better. So, when [Gigawipf], aka [Yannick Richter] wanted to make a camera, he knew he had to go big or go home. So big he went: a medium format camera with a whopping 3.2 gigapixel resolution.

Now, getting a hold of a sensor like that is not easy, and [Yannick] didn’t even try. The hack starts by tearing down a couple of recent-model Kodak scanners from eBay to get at those sweet CCD line sensors. Yes, this is that classic hack: the scanner camera. Then it’s off to the oscilloscope and the datasheet for some serious reverse-engineering to figure out how to talk to these things. Protocol analysis starts about 4 minutes in of the embedded video, and is worth watching even if you have no interest in photography.

As for what the line sensor will be talking to, why, it’s nothing other than a Rasberry Pi 5, interfacing through a custom PCB that also holds the stepper driver. Remember this is a line sensor camera: the sensor needs to be scanned across the image plane inside the camera, line by line, just as it is in the scanner. He’s using off-the-shelf linear rails to do that job. Technically we suppose you could use a mirror to optically scan the image across a fixed sensor, but scanner cameras have traditionally done it this way and [Yannick] is keeping with tradition. Why not? It works.

Since these images are going to be huge an SD card in the Pi doesn’t cut it, so this is perhaps the only camera out there with an NVMe SSD. The raw data would be 19 GB per image, and though he’s post-processing on the fly to PNG they’re still big pictures.  There probably aren’t too many cameras sporting 8″ touchscreens out there, either, but since the back of the thing is so large, why not? There’s still a CSI camera inside, too, but in this case it’s being used as a digital viewfinder. (Most of us would have made that the camera.) The scanner cam is, of course, far too slow to generate its own previews. The preview camera actually goes onto the same 3D-printed mount as the line sensor, putting it onto the same focal plane as the sensor. Yes, the real-time previews are used to focus the camera.

In many ways, this is the nicest scanner camera we’ve ever featured, but that’s perhaps to be expected: there have been a lot of innovations to facilitate this build since scanner cams were common. Even the 3D printed and aluminum case is professional looking. Of course a big sensor needs a big lens, and after deciding projector lenses weren’t going to cut it, [Yannick] sprung for Pentax 6×7 system lenses, which are made for medium format cameras like this one. Well, not exactly like this one– these lenses were first made for film cameras in the 60s. Still, they offer a huge image, high-quality optics, and manual focus and aperture controls in a format that was easy to 3D-print a mount for.

Is it the most practical camera? Maybe not. Is it an impressive hack? Yes. We’ve always had a soft-spot for scanner cameras, and a in a recent double-ccd camera hack, we were lamenting in the comments that nobody was doing it anymore. So we’re very grateful to [Manawyrm] for sending in the tip.

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A 489 Megapixel Camera For Not A Lot

June 12, 2023 by 26 Comments

The megapixel wars of a decade ago saw cameras aggressively marketed on the resolution of their sensors, but as we progressed into the tens of megapixels it became obvious even to consumers that perhaps there might be a little more to the quality of a digital camera than just its resolution. Still, it’s a frontier that still has a way to go, even if [Yunus Zenichowski]’s 489 megapixel prototype is a bit of an outlier. As some of you may have guessed it’s a scanner camera, in which the sensor is a linear CCD that is mechanically traversed over the focal plane to capture the image line by line.

In the 3D printed shell are the guts of a cheap second-hand Canon scanner, and the lens comes from a projector. Both these components make it not only one of the highest resolution cameras we’ve ever brought you, but also by no means the most expensive. It’s definitely a work in progress and the results of a sensor designed for the controlled environment of a document scanner being used with real-world light leave something to be desired, but even with the slight imperfections of the projector lens it’s still a camera capable of some fascinating high-resolution photography. The files are all available, should you be interested, and you can see it in action in the video below the break.

It’s by no means the first scanner camera we’ve brought you, though some of the earlier projects now have dead links. It is however easily the one with the highest resolution.

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DIY Single Pixel Digital Camera

January 21, 2015 by 46 Comments

[Artlav] wanted to build a digital camera, but CCDs are expensive and don’t respond well to all wavelengths of light. No problem, then, because with a photodiode, a few stepper motors, the obligatory Arduino, and a cardboard box, it’s pretty easy to make one from scratch.

The camera’s design is based on a camera obscura – a big box with a pinhole in one side. This is all a camera really needs as far as optics go, but then there’s the issue of digitizing the faint image projected onto the rear of the camera. That’s fine, just build a cartesian robot inside the box and throw a photodiode in there.

There are a few considerations when choosing a photodiode for a digital camera. Larger photodieodes have higher noise but lower resolution. [Artlav] has been experimenting with a few diodes, but his options are limited by export control restrictions.

Even with the right photodiode, amplifying the tiny amount of current – picoamps in some cases – is hard. The circuit is extremely sensitive to EMI, and it’s inside a box with stepper motors pulled from the scrap bin. It’s amazing this thing works at all.

Still, [Artlav] was able to get some very high resolution images across a huge range of wavelengths. He’s even getting a few images in mid-wave infrared, turning this homebrew digital camera into the slowest thermal imaging camera we’ve ever seen.