DIY Instant Camera, But Not The Kind You're Imagining

If you’ve been wildly despondent at the death of the Polaroid, there is still hope. This DIY “instant camera” by Niklas Roy uses a simple digital camera and printer to take and print images. Here’s the bad part: the camera has no memory so it prints out the image in front of it line by line for a process that takes three minutes total. That means you have to sit perfectly still for your portrait.

My ‘Electronic Instant Camera’, is a combination of an analog b/w videocamera and a thermal receipt printer. The device is something in between a Polaroid camera and a digital camera. The camera doesn’t store the pictures on film or digital medium, but prints a photo directly on a roll of cheap receipt paper while it is taking it. As this all happens very slow, people have to stay still for about three minutes until a full portrait photo is taken.

The full source code is available here and you can basically recreate this thing with Niklas’ instructions. Amazing, fun stuff.
via Technabob