Digital Upgrade Brings Medium Format Camera Into the 21st Century

Large format cameras can produce amazing shots, but are a bit too bulky to be practical. Medium format is a different story, as [Wenting] demonstrates with his Sitina B220M — …. Digital Upgrade Brings Medium Format Camera Into the 21st Century.

Medium format is a different story, as [Wenting] demonstrates with his Sitina B220M — an open-source digital back for the Mamiya Super 23 camera using a full-frame Kodak CCD. “Digital back” just means he’s replacing the rear of an existing film camera to put a sensor where said film used to live. The sensor is a 22 Megapixel Kodak KAF-22000CE, which measures in at a very respectable 38.8 mm by 50 mm.

That’s only a touch smaller than the rolls of 120 the camera was designed for, whose large dimension was 56 mm. How much was exposed at a time was determined by the back you put on the camera, but would never have been below 41.5 mm. With Mamiya covering the optics, [Wenting] could focus on the digital end.

He’s got a Xilinx Zynq 7010 running the show, making use of both that SoC’s Cortex-A9 cores and its built-in FPGA.