kodak

15 Articles

Custom Frame Grabber Gets Vintage Kodak Digital Camera Back In The Game

February 25, 2025 by 6 Comments

What do you do with a four-megapixel monochrome digital camera from the 90s that needed a dedicated PC with a frame grabber card to do anything useful? Easy — you turn it into a point-and-shoot by building your own frame grabber.

At least that’s what [Frost Sheridan] did with a vintage Kodak MegaPlus 4.2i, a camera that was aimed at the industrial and scientific market at a time when everyone was still using film for snapshots. Making this workhorse ride again meant diving into the manual, luckily still available after all these years, and figuring out what pins on the 68 pin connector would be useful. [Frost] worked out the pins for serial commands plus the 10-bit parallel interface, although he settled for the eight most significant bits to make things simpler. A Teensy with some extra RAM and a serial interface chip takes care of sending commands to the camera and pulling pixels off the parallel interface, and a 128×160 LCD provides a much-needed viewfinder.

With a battery pack mounted the whole thing is reasonably portable, if a bit of a chore to use. It’s worth the effort, though; the picture quality is fantastic, with a wide dynamic range and plenty of contrast. Hats off to [Frost] for bringing this beauty back to life without making any permanent modifications to it.

Disc Film,When Kodak Pushed Convenience Too Far

December 10, 2024 by 47 Comments

Having a penchant for cheap second-hand cameras can lead to all manner of interesting equipment. You never know what the next second-hand store will provide, and thus everything from good quality rangefinders an SLRs to handheld snapshot cameras can be yours for what is often a very acceptable price. Most old cameras can use modern film in some way, wither directly or through some manner of adapter, but there is one format that has no modern equivalent and for which refilling a cartridge might be difficult. I’m talking about Kodak’s Disc, the super-compact and convenient snapshot cameras which were their Next Big Thing in the early 1980s. In finding out its history and ultimate fate, I’m surprised to find that it introduced some photographic technologies we all still use today.

Easy Photography For The 1980s

Since their inception, Kodak specialised in easy-to-use consumer cameras and films. While almost all the film formats you can think of were created by the company, their quest was always for a super-convenient product which didn’t require any fiddling about to take photographs. By the 1960s this had given us all-in-one cartridge films and cameras such as the Instamatic series, but their enclosed rolls of conventional film made them bulkier than required. The new camera and film system for the 1980s would replace roll film entirely, replacing it with a disc of film that would be rotated between shots to line up the lens on an new unexposed part of its surface. Thus the film cartridge would be compact and thinner than any other, and the cameras could be smaller, thinner, and lighter too. The Disc format was launched in 1982, and the glossy TV adverts extolled both the svelteness of the cameras and the advanced technology they contained. Continue reading “Disc Film,When Kodak Pushed Convenience Too Far” →

Sometimes It’s Worth Waiting: Kodak Finally Release Their Super 8 Camera

November 23, 2023 by 32 Comments

Think of all those promised products that looked so good and were eagerly awaited, but never materialized. Have you ever backed a Kickstarter project in the vain hope that one day your novelty 3D printer might appear? Good luck with the wait! But sometimes, just sometimes, a product everyone thought was dead and gone pops up unexpectedly.

So it is with Kodak’s infamous new Super 8 camera, which they announced in 2018 and had the world of film geeks salivating over, then went quiet on. It’s abandoned, we all thought, and then suddenly five years later it isn’t. If you really must have the latest in analog film-making gear, you can put your name down to order one now.

Continue reading “Sometimes It’s Worth Waiting: Kodak Finally Release Their Super 8 Camera” →

Improving A Kodak Film Digitizer

August 23, 2023 by 11 Comments

Despite the near-complete collapse of its ecosystem in the face of portable videocassette camcorders in the 1980s, somehow the 8 mm format, smallest of the movie films, has survived the decades. There’s a special aura around an 8 mm image which electronic recordings don’t replicate, plus for film makers there’s an attraction to working with real film. Unsurprisingly almost all of the devices used with 8 mm film have ceased to be manufactured, but a few items escaped the cut. It’s still possible to buy an 8 mm digitizer for example, and it’s one of these with a Kodak brand that [Mac84] has. Unsatisfied with its image quality, he’s set about tinkering with its firmware to give it some video adjustment possibilities and remove its artifact-prone artificial sharpening.

Helped by the device having a handy EEPROM from which to extract the code, he was able to recover the firmware intact. From here on he was in luck, because the digitizer’s Novatek CPU is shared with some dash cams and this had spawned a hacker scene. From there he was able to find the relevant area and adjust those settings, and after a few false starts, re-flash it to the device.

The results can be seen in the video below the break, and perhaps reveal much about what we expect from an image in the digital age. The sharpened images look good, until we see untampered versions which are closer to the original.

If you don’t have a Kodak scanner you can always build one yourself, and meanwhile like many people we are still wondering what happened to that new Super 8 camera they announced in 2018 but never released.

Continue reading “Improving A Kodak Film Digitizer” →

SLR To DSLR Conversion Becomes Full Camera

August 22, 2023 by 8 Comments

At least as far as the inner workings are concerned, there’s not a whole lot of difference between an single-lens reflex (SLR) camera that uses film and a digital SLR (DSLR) camera that uses an electronic sensor except the method for capturing the image. So adding the digital image sensor to a formerly analog camera like this seemed like an interesting project for [Wenting Zhang]. But this camera ballooned a little further than that as he found himself instead building a complete, full-frame digital camera nearly from scratch.

The camera uses a full-frame design and even though the project originally began around the SLR mechanism, in the end [Wenting] decided not to keep this complex system in place. Instead, to keep the design simple and more accessible a mirrorless design is used with an electronic viewfinder system. It’s also passive M lens mount, meaning that plenty of manual lenses will be available for this camera without having to completely re-invent the wheel.

As far as the sensor goes, [Wenting] wanted something relatively user-friendly with datasheets available so he turned to industrial cameras to find something suitable, settling on a Kodak charge-coupled device (CCD) for the sensor paired with an i.MX processor. All of the electronics have publicly-available datasheets which is important for this open-source design. There’s a lot more work that went into this build than just picking parts and 3D printing a case, though, and we’d definitely recommend anyone interested to check out the video below for how this was all done. And, for those who want to go back to the beginnings of this project and take a different path, it’s definitely possible to convert an analog SLR to a digital one.

Continue reading “SLR To DSLR Conversion Becomes Full Camera” →

Modern Brownie Camera Talks SD And WiFi

June 11, 2023 by 4 Comments

If you’re at all into nostalgic cameras, you’ve certainly seen the old Brownie from Kodak. They were everywhere, and feature an iconic look. [JGJMatt] couldn’t help but notice that you could easily find old ones at a good price, but finding and developing No. 117 film these days can be challenging. But thanks to a little 3D printing, you can install an ESP32 camera inside and wind up with a modern but retro-stylish camera. The new old camera will work with a memory card or send data over WiFi.

The Brownie dates back to 1900 and cost, initially, one dollar. Of course, a dollar back then is worth about $35 now, but still not astronomical. After cleaning up and tuning up an old specimen, it was time to fire up the 3D printer.

There are also mods to the camera to let it accept an M12 lens. There are many lenses of that size you can choose from. There are a few other gotchas, like extending the camera cable, but it looks like you could readily reproduce this project if you wanted one of your very own.

We’ve seen old cameras converted before. Or, you can just start from scratch.

A Dead Photographic Format Rises From The Ashes

December 2, 2022 by 34 Comments

Sometimes we stumble upon a hack that’s not entirely new but which is still pretty exceptional. So it is with [Hèrm Hofmeyer]’s guide to recreating a film cartridge for the Kodak Disc photographic format. It’s written in 2020, but describing a project around a decade old.

The disc format was Kodak’s great hope in the 1980s, the ultimate in photographic convenience in which the film was a 16-shot circular disc in a thin cartridge. Though the cameras were at the consumer end of the market they were more sophisticated than met the eye, with the latest electronics for the time and some innovative plastic multi-element aspherical lenses. It failed in the face of better compact 35 mm cameras because the convenience of the disc wasn’t enough to make up for the relatively small negative and that few labs had the specialized printing equipment to get the best results from the format. The cameras faded from view, and the film ceased manufacture at the end of the 1990s.

The biggest hurdle to creating a Disc cartridge comes in the cartridge shells themselves. It’s solved by sourcing them second-hand from Film Rescue International, a specialist in developing expired photographic film. The stages follow the cutting of a film disc, perforating its edges, and fitting it into the cartridge. It’s an exact enough process in the pictures, and it’s worth remembering that in the real cartridges it must be done in the dark.

This is an interesting piece of work for anyone with an interest in photography, and while the Disc cameras were always a consumer snapshot camera we can see that it would appeal to those influenced by Lomography. We wish we could get our hands on a Disc cartridge, an maybe CAD up a 3D printable version to make it more accessible.