A Japanese photographer/hacker has put together an interesting camera hack, essentially pairing a regular SLR lens with an enormous digital back: a flatbed scanner. The scanning head moves across the exposure area, as far as i can tell, and gets the correct exposure, which much have been a pain to work out. Like many other mega-cameras, the exposure takes a long time to finish (though for a different reason than usual), so you won’t be getting any action shots with this thing.

I’d like to see what a populated picture looks like with this thing, though. It’s not clear how the scanner head works its way through the picture, so depending on that you’d have people cut in half, bits of the background obscured or in shadow, etc. Could be pretty freaky. What am I talking about, you can see some pictures like that here at his Flickr page. It’s mostly still stuff, unsurprisingly, but you can see on this one what happens when there’s jitter. The full resolution one here also has some discussion of the scanner’s sensor.

Some of these pictures are quite good… there’s some quality to them I just can’t place.

[via Bouncing Red Ball and Hack a day]