Ok I have to have one of these

[Stevenmarc]

First because I still love shooting with film and secondly because they look so damn good



Now I have to see just how easy it really is to track down the lenses needed for the project

Kickstarter page

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/71185779/duo-a-diy-twin-lens-reflex-camera-for-instant-film

[Speck Tater]

1. Fascinating.

I've often thought it would be interesting to adapt an old view camera (4x5) to shoot with print paper instead of film. That way you could develop the paper negative in a tray under safelight, Then once developed you could scan the 4x5 paper negative and reverse it in Photoshop to make positive prints with your computer printer.

With a 4800 DPI scanner you could get images 24,000 pixels by 19,200. That's a 460 megapixel image!!!

[Stevenmarc]

2. That does sound like a great project

As much as I love the ease of digital I still love the touchy feelyness of the darkroom, in fact I'm starting to convert a bunch of iphone photos into digital negatives so I can do some platinum printing.

[sir pball]

4. The artistic-ness would be great but if you're chasing resolution

You've just opened up a huge can of worms. Film beats paper hands-down - Fuji claims Velvia (the best photographic "sensor" in the history of mankind, BTW) can resolve 160 line pairs per millimeter. We'll be generous and give it 100 in the real world, that works out to 5080 dpi (100lp/mm * 25.4mm/in * 2 lines/lp). Theoretically, a 25400x20320 image, or 516Mpix image. Great!

But the devil is in the details. First, the camera. You MIGHT be able to find an old view camera on the relatively cheap, but to put a sharp enough image on the film, you're going to want a good lens - and large format lenses aren't exactly affordable. Or anything less than obscenely expensive, actually. Then there's the scanning issue...to get that 5080 dpi you need to scan at 10160 and then downsize the image, it's a physics thing (Nyquist theorem if you're interested). Which means you need a drum scanner. Which are tens of thousands of dollars and need a full-time professional operator; most large-format shooters outsource their scanning at $75-150 or more per SINGLE 4x5 sheet. Plus the cost of film and processing, it's not too bad compared to the rest at $6-10 a shot but when you take hundreds of shots it adds up.

Basically, and it's the consensus even among the idiots with more money than brains over at Luminous Landscape and the like, you're better off coughing up for something like these guys; the upfront cost is three or four times what you'll pay for a 4x5 or a good medium-format film system but it pays itself off pretty fast.

[SouthernDonkey]

5. WOW!

Do these guys seriously make enough to justify a 45k digital slr? Is there that kind of money to be made? Why would you really need something like that, for seriousl cropping or blowing up?
Awesome...but I don't get it.

[sir pball]

7. Mostly product/fashion and artists

People shooting jewelry or cars where you want to see every tiny detail, or making 40x60 gallery prints of the High Sierras where you can still see the leaves on the trees.

Photography has always been ridiculously expensive; a good 6x6 film body is still in the thousands of dollars and that's ignoring the elephant in the room of the optics - a single lens can easily cost 4 times the body and no good photographer has just one. And the film...there's a well-known couture photographer who uses an 8x10 view camera - the film is $15 a sheet, he shoots around 3000 shots a year. Granted there's absolutely nothing digital that even comes close to that...this 2 gigapixel photo of Everest is about half what you'd get with an 8x10 sheet of Velvia.

[2naSalit]

3. Oh! What memories that brings!

My dad had a Richoflex he got in Japan in the 50s, I confiscated it in the early 70s for a summer. My first experience with a "real camera" as I called it. Took some good pics with it... wish I still had them. But the camera itself was like a magical instrument that piqued my interest for photography... now I have one digital but it accomplishes a good deal of what I want. I'll have to figure out how to post some of my images (I just finally found my way to this forum).

Love your project, I may know of some individuals who may be interested donors, I'll steer them in your direction! I'd like to have one of those.

2na

[Blue_In_AK]

6. Since I didn't get into photography, really, until the digital age

(except for family snapshots with the Instamatic), these would intimidate the hell out of me.