Not really my area, I do audio. they guys above me at work do imaging and facial recognition stuff (Rich made a very cool computerised face that mimicks your facial expressions and reacts to your image, eg smile at it and it smiles back, wave and it smiles turn your back and it sulks at you etc, pull funny faces and it mimicks you).

how many of these would you sell though really, tens of thousands? If I could find a cheap full frame sensor and control gear I would look into it, they don;t appear to exist (I've been looking most of the evening).

there is a bit of slack on the film pressure plate and its the back of the sensor it has to focus on, the glass layers on the front are not an issue. so long as its mounted on a VERY thin circuit board then you should be ok, think the flexible kapton board and you should be able to make it work.

A small Li-Ion battery would be light, easy to make into silly convenient shapes and rechargeable, would be an ideal power source.

If you use SD card you could simply drop an Eye-Fi card in to allow wifi downloads.

Fit a small IR sensor to the edge of the frame window, as soon as the curtains move it fires the sensor, this will give a fraction of a second for the sensor to power up (no idea what the power on time of a sensor is) and take the pic.

the 'inputs' you have to control the cartridge would be:
moving curtain (enable the sensor capture)
Film advance lever
film rewind crank (turn the unit on and off)

You could WiFi all images straight to an external viewer/storage device (modern mobile smart phone should do the trick).

Frame location only varies in one dimention and that is easliy solved by my method above.

You could program ISO via a wifi connection and phone app (also a good way to check images, no need for a screen). Or just set the iso when you load the film canister.

Why does the sensor need to talk to the camera??? a film doesn't.

you could switch power to the cartrige on and off using the film rewind crank, the senor can scan the RHS of the film plane and record as soon as it detects light from the moving shutter curtain.


EDIT: Mowog (correct spelling and everything ) you just need to make the sensor to fit into the gate (not sure that is the correct term but it will do) and connect it to the canister with a long enough flexible ribbon cable, you then just wrap as much of this cable as you don't need (and I reckon we are talking an inc or so max) around the canister as you put it in.

If you keep the function simple and try and make an electronic film not convert a spotmatic into a digital SLR I think its relatively simple. the buggest cost issue is the full frame sensor, if whoever made the canon 5D sensors is still going I'm sure they would be adequate, about 12.7Mp and old enough to be cheap.

I'd like something like this, IMHO its very feasable but the very small market for it means it would never take off IMHO:

Full Frame sensors are expensive, You wouldn't want a silly little crop sensor in there.

Most cameras have a different length from film cartrige to the frame (I know a good work around for this) which can make creating a generic design difficult specific model designs would be VERY costly and market limiting.

Not a lot of room in there for electronics, I would like to see a small rechargeable Li-Ion battery to run it and a WiFi output for downloading pics and changing settings. Once its in the camera you really want to leave it in there IMHO, removing it to download is asking for damage IMHO.

I have looked at a dead spotmatic I have in pieces and a couple of DSLRs to see if I think I could make things fit.

When I get round to processing the film in the ESII I'll resubmit it, I took the same pic with the same lens on both the 20D and ESII.

Shot in the garden on my Canon 20D with PENTAX SMC Takumar 105mm f2.8




Bit of PP to increase the contrast and sharpen but that is about it.

Thoughts??

Some bloke called Chris who I keep miss-quoting

blame the fat fingers