Product Launch
anonymous
405 points
127 comments
Posted6d agoActive5h ago
Camera
medium.commvphardwarephotographers, tech enthusiasts
Key Features
AI-powered cameracustomizableprototype developed
Tech Stack
AI
Key Features
Tech Stack
The article could have been better with sharing some photos taken with the new camera.
Lovely project! I'm a software guy who in recent years does lots of CAD for hobby projects (mainly robotics) and orders custom machined parts (lots of sheet metal construction, occasionally milled parts) along with 3D printing.
I find parametric modelling very zen. Stacking operations is very Lego-like, like stringing up pure functions. Plus I can listen to podcasts while I model, but not while I write code - it engages the brain differently.
Now that LLMs are sapping some of the joy out of programming (I use the tools, they're productive, achieving goals and delivering user value is still satisfying, etc. - but the act of writing code is just more enjoyable than prompting, so it's a tad dispiriting that it's getting harder to jusitify) I also find that I get a lot of satisfaction from doing something with my hands. In some ways it's a safer space for technical creativity.
Can highly recommend hobbies like this.
Funny, the things some people obsess about :)
And in reviews, complaints were made that the lens (and view finder) being centered in the XT means you squish your nose against the screen in the back.
But... I just liked the look and dials of the XT-5 so much more than the barebones boxy look of the α6700.
(Sony has meaningfully better autofocus too, I'll be sad, but I wanted the nice looking body...)
And yes my nose squishes against that back screen.
The camera is fantastic, though.
All personal preference I guess!
The compact sonys have the viewfinder in the top-left corner, so having the mount to the side improves the paralax situation, although doesn't remove it.
I would also love to see some photos taken with it.
I recently got curious about whether nature solves the Bayer pattern problem and if so, how.
Are there any 3 element crystalline compounds with the formula A_2BC with roughly same sized atoms for A, B and C ?
If they have a 2D tiling that would nature's Bayer pattern.
Even the 1990s cameras were far superior to a "static picture" from our eyes: color everywhere, instead of mostly in the fovea, no blind spot, etc.
What they lacked was: higher resolution wherever you chose to concentrate within the scene at one moment, jagged lines if they weren't perfectly aligned (your eyes correct near-lines to be LINES), and (in the 1990s) lower peak resolution.
(Weirdly, people used to argue that "digital would NEVER have better resolution than film, even though it was clearly trending upwards to and past that static goal...).
I’ve been thinking about putting an MFT mount on my RX100 to use it with more interesting lenses (I have it for the high frame rate capability) but concluded it to be way too much effort and risk.
And then along comes a person with enough determination to build an entire custom case! Truly impressive.
There was something specific to the body of the 1D that allowed for the proper flange depth of PL lenses that the other Canon bodies did not work for this mod.
If there is anything that can be patented, I'd make sure to patent it.
$5k under the table is a small price to pay for such potential payoff, not to mention the value of the chilling effect on competition.
It's unethical, seedy, shitty, banal, and pestilent, the kind of thing that only the most hellbound and soulless of sleazebags would ever even think of to do, but it's profitable.
Funnily enough, one of my former bosses has one or two patents on something really simple that he came up with. It's a really clever piece of tech that the military uses, stupid simple to implement too.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent [2]: https://www.gov.uk/register-a-design
I saw the level of detail in the model and am shocked. If this is truly their first experience with CAD/CAM they are a natural.
For example - here’s my home built camera. It’s massively more simplistic: https://blog.maxg.io/phase-one-swc/
Also recommend using the BOSL2 library with OpenSCAD - it turnes an already very powerful tool into something insane:
Thanks for sharing!
Grasshopper can also output gcode directly [1], enabling pretty wild things like [2].
[1]: https://interactivetextbooks.tudelft.nl/rhino-grasshopper/Gr...
I wonder how does openscad compare to FreeCADs python, if you know. I just found https://pythonscad.org/ which looks interesting, but then, the BOSL2 library looks super interesting and important for a good user experience, so I do not know if the PythonSCAD could somehow just import it and use it.
I guess there's homework for me to do here, but if anyone has the experience to get a hint of "what is the best/easiest python-based programming way of doing 3D modeling", I'd be forever thankful for sharing their thoughts.
LLMs are really good at writing Python, so iterating over a model in code I found is really quick, and I really enjoy the process. Meanwhile clicking so many times in so many menus makes me desist on designing anything more-or-less complex.
The Fuji X-E5 also seems similar to this, though obviously with a different lens mount.
The G-100D is also quite small, but the faux pentaprism at the top makes it just a bit too big to justify being MFT.
https://petapixel.com/2025/06/28/the-panasonic-lumix-gm-5-is...
Especially OM - with all their troubles, if it were me I'd have pivoted the company to sizes that do justice to the mount's inherent size advantage. They have a rich legacy of amazing small cameras (Trip, Pen, XA series, and the overrated mju ii) - yet it's fuji selling an order of magnitude more x-halfs than anything OM is producing.
It doesn't seem like it would take a lot to keep this line going. Bump the sensor, change the USB cable, add GPS, etc... but keep the form factor.
I guess the market just isn't big enough.
What I'm hoping to see is a new penf. When it came out, they somehow managed to cram into that small body almost everything the em1 had at the time. The om3 is pretty small, too, but for some reason they decided to keep the faux-pentaprism bump. It would have been great if it had the viewfinder to the side.
But 100% agree on the OM-1 and OM-3. They're smaller than many APS-C bodies, especially once you add a lens, but they're nowhere near pocketable, not even in a jacket pocket. And I feel like the OM-3 was a bit of a miss - it should have been a "rangefinder" form factor (no pentaprism hump) and a few mm smaller in each dimension. And marketed as a Pen-F. That said, the camera itself seems to be pretty darn good - basically a slightly smaller, vintage-vibe OM-1. Once used examples hit the market, I'll be tempted to buy one.
My parents both shoot Nikon DSLRs and I chuckle every time they break out their birding lenses (400mm NIKKOR of some sort). It's as big as my forearm and fills half a backpack. My Lumix 100-300 (yeah, not quite apple-to-apple) is minuscule in comparison. [I don't do enough wildlife to bother with a more expensive telephoto).
There's Esquisse (https://esquisse.camera/) trying to step up, but it's still in the very early stages.
> This project is open-source under the MIT License. Feel free to modify and use — but no commercial use without permission.
[0] https://github.com/cristibaluta/Leica-G9ii?tab=readme-ov-fil...
This kind of thing works better with GPL. General use falls under GPL. If that doesn’t suit your commercial use, contact the copyright holder for another license.
As it stands, I can use the MIT licensed project anyway I like, including handing it to a commercial entity for their use.
But MIT + weird condition is radioactive to anyone who takes licensing seriously.
Might just as well write "for hobbyist use only".
The intent is not at all clear.
Does the author not mind people making money so long as they give back to the community? If so, then copyleft with exceptions by the license holder could be a compromise.
Does the author not want people making money at all without explicit permission? Then no open-source license will suffice and it should have been put under a non-commercial license or left without a license at all so that the default copyright restrictions apply.
You say that this project is MIT licensed and therefore available for you to use commercially. Is this true? The license section in the README clearly says not to use it for commercial purposes. Which takes precedence?
I so deeply want a modern EVF camera, doesn’t even have to be a rangefinder, with a mechanically wound shutter so the film advance lever has a reason to exist.
I’m aware of the Epson R1 but 6MP is too low.
On the other hand there's no other class of camera that really works on vacation/travel and is meaningfully better than a smartphone. Oh, well.
The marketing gimmick for awhile was ultra-zooms which allow for smaller lenses via fixing distortion using DSP, but this degrades the image quality, and so never became a solution for RAW shooters.
Before phone for major event like graduation, wedding and baby birth people do buy one camera with one lens for the occasion and keep it as a family heirloom like. And even students gala and performances. Whilst a lot of point and shot, slr and later dslr are common. The key it is not a hobby to them but a life even to record.
Unlike people like us canon and nikon found it hard to sell the second lens or even second body.
It is not the hardware, it is the software …
Furthermore, I find the physical buttons on the om1 are so customizable and can do so many things, that I never go in the menu, either. I haven't tried new models from the other makers, but the olympus models I have are much nicer to use than my old canon 40d and nikon d80.
My a6500 is serving me well, though I guess it depends what you mean by "meaningfully better than a smartphone". I do end up with a lot more photos that I like when I go on vacation with a camera than with just a smartphone.
I was very disappointed with the om3. I love the aesthetic, but I feel it's half-assed. The faux-pentaprism bump is the specific point I hate. If it had the body of a pen-f, I would have been all over it. As it is, it's just a prettier om-1 with worse ergonomics.
I should note that I already have a pen-f, and don't have any issue with its ergonomics (I used it yesterday on -5ºC with big gloves, it was fine). Since I don't lug around foot-long lenses, the lack of grip isn't a problem.
Lately I've been converting a few old 5k iMac's to work as external displays, and I had a thought about making my own housing for the display instead of using the iMac chassis. This gives me some motivation to look into it further!
"For iMac A1419 A2115 5K LCD Screen Driver Board LM270QQ1 LM270QQ2 Retinal Control Motherboard 5120*2880 QQHD HDMI DP Type-c"
...it will come up with what I have used in the last few conversions.
Though I have seen Quinn Nelson (Snazzy Labs on YouTube) released a video recently that shows his process which is a bit more involved, but better. Apparently his method is better to remove risks of power surges from the controller board (I haven't experienced it yet...!), but his method also retains the speakers, and relocates the I/O inputs to be more accessible.
Inspired me to write this blog post: https://brooker.co.za/blog/2023/04/20/hobbies.html
Are they?
Cheap taps from Amazon?
Unless you're tapping something super tough (306?), Amazon taps are fine for hand tapping. Go in straight, use a good lubricant.
I've examined cheap taps under a microscope. Maybe they are of varying quality, but the ones I got had burrs all along the cutting edges. A tap that I borrowed from a machine shop was flawless in comparison. So maybe the middle ground is caveat emptor.
Another trick for tapping is to use something pointy in the drill chuck to center the tap after drilling, assuming you've clamped down your workpiece in a drill press or mill. This works for really big taps when you don't have a guide for them. Likewise the tailstock of a lathe can be used for this purpose.
I understand the urge to say this to potential blog readers. But you're not actually selling us anything. Who cares if you're qualified or not? You built it and you're telling us what you learned.
lol. Sounds like every passion project, ever.
I have friends who have worked on their car project, their bathroom project, their workshop project, their custom pc build, even the home they built.
I wonder if anyone has ever built something and said... "It is perfect, I am satisfied!"
Maybe just from the outside. Like the casio f91w, the ak47, the porsche 959 or the hersheys bar.
One tip for the author who noticed the camera being warm: measure its power consumption, and compare to an unmodified G9ii. Especially because you noticed it drains the battery relatively quickly(!) This is a glaring "connect the dots" situation to me. The root cause might be something very stupid. For example when you removed the microphone jack, the camera thought a microphone was connected, so it activated a microphone nenu. But given the extensive number of mods you made, it's possible you are making the firmware think some accessory is connected—could be anything: (light) flash, external screen, USB gadget, JTAG reader, SD card, etc. So it's taking a code path to initialize the device, but it fails because the device is not present, and it retries repeatedly, thus entering a retry loop that's causing excessive CPU usage... That wouldn't suprise me. You are running a G9ii that's unique therefure a weird software code path like this would not happen on a standard G9ii and would never have been fixed by the developers.
At my kids' elementary school there is a yearly "Dad's Night" show where the dads get up and do skits, dance, sing and/or make funny videos.
You get to see dads who sell insurance or are lawyers do dance numbers that look professionally choreographed or make music videos that look like they could have been on MTV.
It's a reminder that "The Sort" pulls people very strongly into certain fields but there is always that question, from the movie Up In The Air and asked by George Clooney, "How much did they pay you to give up your dream?" [0]
Part of me is VERY excited to see AI/LLMs help facilitate this for the people who always thought "I have always wanted to write a piece of software but didn't know how and now I can!"
Going straight into making a camera is very much a bold move.
my next comment isn't for the author, as they have strong enough opinions on cameras to do this. But for everyone else, I have greatly enjoyed fujifilms line of cameras.
I borrowed a gfx100s from work, and my word is a wonderful machine. (it should be for the price) for more normal budgets, the x series is great. Unlike a canon what you see is what you get, and the autofocus works on objects rather than the closest fucking thing it sees.
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