Hacking a Pi Camera with a Nikon Lens

Cell phones have killed many industries. It is getting harder and harder to justify buying an ordinary watch, a calculator, or a day planner because your phone does all those things at least as well as the originals. Cell phones have cameras too, so the days of missing a shot because you don’t have a camera with you are over (although we always wonder where the flood of Bigfoot and UFO pictures are). However, you probably still have a dedicated camera tucked away somewhere because, let’s face it, most cell phone cameras are just not that good.

The Raspberry Pi camera is about on par with a cheap cell phone camera. [Martijn Braam] has a Nikon camera, and he noticed that he could get a Raspberry Pi camera with a C-mount for lenses. He picked up a C to F adapter and proceeded to experiment with Nikon DSLR lenses on the Raspberry Pi camera.

You’d think the pictures would be great, right? They are good, but [Martijn] found that the Pi’s sensor actually compensates for color effects found in the little cheap lenses it would usually have. That threw the color of the shots off when used with an expensive DSLR lens. Of course, there’s plenty of color correction software.

The lenses are generally made to hit a bigger sensor, too. That means the Pi camera gets a cropped view of what a DSLR would with the same lens.

Is it practical? We don’t know what we’d use it for. But it certainly is a hack, and we like that. If you want something more practical, maybe use the Pi to control the whole DSLR (see video below). Of course, some people want more than one lens, and we know some people would find [Martijn’s] choice of lens just too modern.

Filed under: Raspberry Pi

from Hackaday » raspberry pi http://ift.tt/1MiEa24
via Hack a Day