Building a Digicam from Scanner Elements

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Want a weird & wobbly digital camera, but don't want to spend over $100? Well, Matthias Wandel, whose site is due for some /. lovin', used the guts of a cheap scanner, some camera parts, and scrap wood to build a very high quality digitcal camera. Read about progress at this site. Oh, and he also builds things out of legos as well." I personally think that his Jenga Pistol and wasp-vacuum are pretty neat too.

lens issues

[Alien54]

For the lens, I used an obsolete 35mm F/2.8 screwmount SLR camera lens. The lens is so obsolete, its even predates the Pentax screwmount (which I still use). The lens has no anti reflective coating, and, a completely manual aperture - that is, it even predates the automatic aperture reduction when the shutter is released. Its entirely manual. Perfect for the job.

Something like this is going to be next to impossible to find. and might be a photographic collectable as well?

Perfect reading for a sunday afternoon. File away as technology to remember for after the end of the world.

Re:High Resolution Vs. High Quality

[npietraniec]

You seem to have missed the fact that he *built a camera out of a scanner*

He was impressed with the resolution, and I think it looks pretty good too.

The point was to try and build it, not try to create a perfect image... I'm sure you've seen better images with a 1.5 megapixel camera, that's what they're built to do... I'm sure we can also assume that the picture on the site was shrunk down with a sort of image program to make it more web friendly