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ReFrame – The EPaper Camera (reframe.camera)
79 points by phil294 6 hours ago
12 comments

Its a great idea, I think they should read the papers on dithering (I've got a color e-paper display and you can get a lot less noise than that by better dithering). The interesting thing is that back in the film days you took your 12 pictures and sent them off to the lab, and two or three days later you found out if any of them were great. This gives some of that "wait for it" kind of feel back to the photography. And at least for me, I think longer about taking a shot if I won't know instantly if its good or not :-)
Great work! About two hours ago, I was listening to "Générique" by Miles Davis (jazz) with a noisy, animated gradient background. The whole experience felt incredibly immersive. Now, this camera can bring that beautiful noise texture into photos with a single click. Add some clever motion graphics and transform those photos into illustrative noisy textured gradients, it could become an amazing music visualizer for jazz lovers. I don't know why, but I'm really obsessed with noisy textures.

Générique by Miles Davis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q73OSYyq5E0

Immersive noisy background: https://monopo.vn/

(I'm not affiliated with the site in any way. I just came across it on the Awwwards website: https://www.awwwards.com/inspiration/monopo-saigon-hypnotic-...)

Very cute idea. I would expect that with a 15 second develop time and no live display preview some kind of optical viewfinder would be very helpful. I love seeing weird cameras.
This dithering could also be an interesting variation: https://dead.garden/blog/how-my-images-are-dithered.html

(Featured few days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49006096)

Reminds me of photos in games about 30 years ago…
cute. I'd like to see some photos without the dithering applied, as it looks similar to a regular dithered jpeg, like you'd see on https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

it would be fun to try out a few different algos for the colour space conversion.

Thanks for that website link, I really like dithered aesthetics. I will convert my entire photos into dithers. Thank you so much again.
Very cool! Any idea what the approximate battery life on this is?
ove the constraints—15 seconds to develop and one photo at a time makes it feel like a digital Polaroid. Great that it’s open source, too.
A color eink screen is a wonderful recalibration for a screen that kids can use compared to the overstimulation of an lcd, especially with touchscreen features.

    > With ePaper, the photo on screen stays there even after powering off.  
    > The only way to clear the screen is to take a new photo.
    > 
    > Source: https://reframe.camera 
Thank you... dear developers, artists, people... for the marvel, art you do...
So is the goal to make ewaste now?

What is the point?

I don't fully understand the obsession with making less-capable devices and talking about them as though being less capable is a feature by itself.
Restriction is a widely used technique in both art, and life. Consider black and white paintings, or generally paintings which only use shades of a single color? Why are they not using all the colors when they exist?

What about people who do challenging athletic endeavors with limitations? The ice guy climbed up to the base camp of Everest in just his shorts and slippers. Why not wear more?

What about minimalism as a way of life? Why not buy more if you have money?

This is just how humans are.

One positive aspect of a camera like this is that it forces you to slow down. Because you can’t take 10 frames per second hoping to get some keepers, you become more intentional when shooting. I took a photography class where we were asked to cover the LCDs with cardboard, so that you couldn’t get an immediate feedback and slow down a bit. Another trick is to format memory cards so that they can only store a few exposures. Going slow sometimes is a good thing.
These days you can flip the LCD facing inwards so it kinda feels like a film camera being viewfinder only.
It seems to be playing on Nostalgia, judging by these paragraphs like this one:

>The dithered photos look somewhere between a newspaper halftone and an old video game. The processing is part of the fun: you watch the colors come in one by one, like a digital polaroid.

Frankly, it does seem like a very fun gimmick, but also highly impractical. But my adoration of this little thing might just come from a general longing of the low-tech, simple devices of the past.

Cameras are both gadgets and instruments of artistic impression, if you only measure them quantitatively you miss a lot.

These cameras can be fun the same way a toy piano might be fun to a virtuoso pianist. Something different.

Something doesn’t have to be for everyone.

There is a good amount of articles of how we worked towards one device for everything, and more are rediscovering single use devices.

One use case is it helps kids understand how things work, including using dvds, etc.

A low fidelity photo allows the imagination to fill in the picture. Insistent kids can relate to lower fidelity as their own writing and drawing evolves.