Digital Improve Brings Medium Format Digicam Into The twenty first Century

Large format cameras can produce wonderful photographs, however are a bit too cumbersome to be sensible. Medium format is a special story, as [Wenting] demonstrates with his Sitina B220M — an open-source digital again for the Mamiya Super 23 digital camera utilizing a full-frame Kodak CCD.

“Digital again” simply means he’s changing the rear of an current movie digital camera to be able to put a sensor the place stated movie used to dwell. The sensor is a 22 Megapixel Kodak KAF-22000CE, which measures in at a really respectable 38.8 mm by 50 mm. That’s solely a contact smaller than the rolls of 120 the digital camera was designed for, whose giant dimension was 56 mm. How a lot was uncovered at a time was decided by the again you placed on the digital camera, however would by no means have been under 41.5 mm. Again, the CCD is fairly shut.

With Mamiya masking the optics, [Wenting] might deal with the digital finish. He’s bought a Xilinx Zynq 7010 operating the present, making use of each that SoC’s Cortex-A9 cores and its built-in FPGA. There’s some first rate information on how that works within the build video embedded under, in the event you don’t wish to dig into the code on the GitLab repository above. The images look nice, and begin at 8:25.

[Wenting] has been across the bush with FPGAs before. Not least in his e-ink monitor project, but additionally with the final iteration of his mirror-less digital camera. This model is maybe much less formidable, being merely a digital again and never the entire enchilada, however it solves some design points he had on the “digital camera” half whereas he focuses on the “digital” for now.