Sitina1 Open-Source Camera

125 pointsposted 10 hours ago
by zdw
(gitlab.com)

26 Comments

LeafItAlone

2 hours ago

I’ve thought for years that there had been dearth of open source cameras. It’s nice to see them picking up steam, with a few recent posts of them.

cyberax

6 hours ago

Love it. I really wish classical mirrorless camera makers would get their head out of their collective asses, and make a camera that is not stuck in the 80-s mentality.

Give me a large sunlight-readable touchscreen, with multitouch. Also GPS, WiFi, Bluetooth, and 5G/LTE for connectivity and geotagging. Add automatic uploads to Google Photos, iPhoto, WebDAV, etc. Put in a small editor for on-device photo touchups.

Also, ditch the old-timey film-camera look. I don't need 15 physical switches, most of which should be automatic anyway. A physical button for the shutter and an analog knob for fine tuning are fine, but I don't need a manual switch for AF/MF. Or a "shutter delay" selector that is too easy to accidentally bump.

dghlsakjg

4 hours ago

There have been a few different attempts that look like this. Samsung Nx, Samsung Galaxy Camera, Sony has tried phone add on accessories. Basically they all sort of flop in the market.

People that don’t want to think about their photos use a smartphone. People that want to think about their photos still want a camera that they can control. I use a mirrorless Nikon camera and to take a single picture I normally want physical controls that can handle exposure, focus, zoom level and shutter release independently, but simultaneously without having to remove my attention from the image. The ability to do all that with physical, not menu controls, is a tremendous asset for most people that want to spend the money on a camera. If you slapped the latest technology inside a camera that didn’t have all the physical controls, photographers wouldn’t want anything to do with it.

I wouldn’t say that camera design is stuck in the 80s, either. The form factor is necessarily constrained by needing a tubular lens projecting in front of a flat imaging plane. The photographer is going to want to view the image from the opposite side as the lens. There’s only so much you can change the form factor with those constraints. Camera companies do have a few retro models, but even stodgy old Leica is making modern designs these days.

If you take tens of thousands of photos per year, you sort of realize that all cameras have more or less the same interface and form factor as they have for a while because it is what works best.

cyberax

2 hours ago

> There have been a few different attempts that look like this. Samsung Nx, Samsung Galaxy Camera, Sony has tried phone add on accessories. Basically they all sort of flop in the market.

There was exactly ONE attempt. One. And it was pretty successful, at that: Samsung NX1. I had it, it was pretty good, but with a first-gen teething issues.

Phone add-on accessories don't work because they're clumsy and connectivity just sucks. And ultra-professional $6k cameras from Zeiss miss the mark entirely, you need to target a prosumer market (i.e. me).

> I wouldn’t say that camera design is stuck in the 80s, either. The form factor is necessarily constrained by needing a tubular lens projecting in front of a flat imaging plane.

But why do you need a large protrusion on the right? You don't have a film canister anymore. I already wrote about a myriad of physical controls. Just make it large enough to hold the camera.

dghlsakjg

2 hours ago

There was one interchangeable lens attempt, and multiple non interchangeable ones. As mentioned, the Samsung galaxy camera, as well as Polaroid branded android cameras.

You need the large protrusion on the right because you have to hold the thing. It’s a handle. It needs to be somewhere, most people are right eye, right hand dominant. It makes a lot of sense to have it that way. The primary hand holds the camera, the other hand holds and supports the lens.

In the olden days, the film canister was physically stored on the left in almost all cameras (and certainly in all SLRs), so the protrusion on the right isn’t really a remnant of film designs.

Older film cameras actually have smaller less ergonomic protrusions on the right (look at a Nikon F2 vs. the modern Z8). The big ergonomic protrusion on the right has been an evolution of newer modern technology and expectations.

You can get a camera with gps, wifi, Bluetooth etc. do they have you screens that don’t have multitouch? It’s pretty hard not to get all that TBH. I can do crops and color treatments on my Nikon if I don’t want to just transfer directly to my phone and do the editing there. Yeah, the camera doesn’t automatically put it all in my iPhoto, but that is literally just a few taps.

There are MILC cameras that have minimal physical controls and touchscreens so I’m not really sure what you’re looking for? The sigma FP is pretty minimal, and you just strap on what you need.

m463

4 hours ago

I agree. Maybe the breakdown is between:

1) taking a picture

2) doing something with the picture

People coming to photography from smartphones want the priorities reversed.

But the deeper you get into it, the more you want #1 and the more control you want over #1. The worst is #2 getting in the way of the shot.

And actually, lots of people into photography think it is about the camera, but it is really about the lenses.

You buy lenses, then buy/upgrade bodies around them.

_0xdd

4 hours ago

I would add that Zeiss (ZX1) and Leica (T typ 701, TL2) tried this modern touch-first approach at a premium and both products weren't exactly hits. The Zeiss was even running Android with Lightroom preinstalled.

cyberax

2 hours ago

I mean... It's a camera that was retailing for $6k without lenses. It's already a niche market, and a pretty conservative one.

chillfox

34 minutes ago

Samsung did make a camera with most of those features (it was before 5G, so 3G I think). I had it, it sucked a lot.

Turns out physical buttons for most things is very important if you want to be able to rapidly change settings as required for capturing a moment. Whenever I tried using that camera I lost so many shots due to the delay of fiddling with menus or the startup time.

progbits

5 hours ago

I'm not sure I want any of that in my camera. Maybe fast wifi for photo sync at home but still faster to plug in the cable/card.

You know what I want and have? A sub half second power on time. Probably sub one second from turning on to first photo. I don't want any "smart" crap slowing that down.

cyberax

5 hours ago

> I'm not sure I want any of that in my camera. Maybe fast wifi for photo sync at home but still faster to plug in the cable/card.

Well, that's a reason why camera makers are struggling. You don't want these features, but a lot of people do. So they vote with their smartphones instead: https://petapixel.com/2024/08/22/the-rise-and-crash-of-the-c...

> You know what I want and have? A sub half second power on time. Probably sub one second from turning on to first photo. I don't want any "smart" crap slowing that down.

You can do that while still retaining smart features. For example, use a small OS to control the camera while the full OS boots up. Or use suspend-to-disk to speed up loading, with suspend-to-RAM for instant startup.

This is a solvable problem.

yjftsjthsd-h

an hour ago

Case in point: My phone can go from "off" (sleep) to taking pictures in less than a second with basically no effort. Why not do the same on a dedicated camera? You'll get better battery from sleep if it has zero wakeups or radios on in sleep, which is fine for this use.

orbital-decay

4 hours ago

Half of the point of having a dedicated camera is better ergonomics. I'm finding current smartphones good enough for most uses, but they are simply awkward to use and very slow to control without an external grip.

quuxly

6 hours ago

This is called a smartphone.

cyberax

6 hours ago

Yes, exactly. But with a better sensor and optics.

999900000999

5 hours ago

I have interest in assembling this, but I'd love to buy it.

I wasted about 1k on trying to design a small backup phone before realizing I couldn't get it down to the dimensions I wanted. I'd need like half a million to actually build this thing.

However, I really want to see more hardware with open software. On the other hand you have open firmware for some cannon cameras if you want to do that route.

gaudat

8 hours ago

The design is pretty modern. But what is with the choice of the Kodak CCD sensor? CCD cameras got a resurgence in Chinese communities with second-hand camera prices increased like tenfold.

Also see Apertus Axiom where they also used the Zynq but used one hell of a CMOS sensor that can do 4K 300FPS.

SushiHippie

7 hours ago

He explained it in this Video at 13:02 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkfzjmY9cF8&t=13m02s

> Why use CCD instead of CMOS?

> Well let's say I started this project before the recent CCD camera hype so that's not the reason. Part of me just wanted to be special and fullframe CCD is kind of special.

dylan604

4 hours ago

Being a small manufacture means you go to the bottom of the list for the vendors of the sensors. I'm sure the best sensors are pretty much already spoken for, and the lower quality ones are what's available to any one not the likes of Sony, Canon, Nikon, etc. Any other reason is pretty much an excuse.

We could just go back to full sized cameras with 3 CCDs. j/k

3abiton

5 hours ago

Great project, I get excited about tools that I didn't expect to get the Open Source treatment pop up on the list.

xena

4 hours ago

Where do I get the parts to make one?

dvh

8 hours ago

Why is there so much vignetting?