[dheera]

I use film camera lenses all the time on my full-frame consumer digital camera, which is at present a slightly better way to bring 35mm film camera lenses back into the modern age.

The problem with retrofitting a film camera back with a Pi camera is that the Pi camera has a dinky little IMX477 sensor which only covers a small, small fraction of the area that would normally be illuminated on 35mm film, so you would not get very good images at all.

If they came out with a full-frame sensor that plugged into the Pi though, that would be awesome.

That said -- that's for 35mm cameras. Now there are also other film cameras ... I am working on using a Pi camera to scan a large format 4x5 area to bring a Toyo view camera back into the modern age :). It takes a good 15-20 minutes to scan the image and I get gigapixel results. Still a work in progress. Un-doing the effect of CRA optimization on the sensor's microlens array is annoying.

https://www.instagram.com/dheeranet.large/

[JKCalhoun]

Cool. I remember when flatbed scanners were pressed into service to make (very) large format images.

Stephen Johnson was playing around with this in the 1990's.

http://www.betterlight.com/field_photography.html

"I initially captured 180 degrees of view in a 6,000 x 40,055 pixel image, but soon learned that Photoshop was limited to opening files with less than 30,000 pixels in either dimension, so I had to perform surgery on the original TIFF file to reduce the image to just under this limit."

[dheera]

I thought about that method as well and after taking apart about 3 scanners it stopped being fun. Scanner assemblies are really hard to work with. Especially that some of them strobe colored RGB lights instead of a colored sensor, some use microlenses, and some won't start scanning if they detect that the light has failed (and you don't want the light for photography, so you disconnect the lights but then find that it refuses to scan). However if there's a hackable linear color CCD that is 4 inches long that I can wire into a RPi that might be super interesting.

[fish_phrenology]

Now that is a neat idea. I was thinking about making a film scanner that can auto scan + cut rolls of 120 and 35 but this is way neater. Thank you for sharing!