Its a great idea, I think they should read the papers on dithering (I've got a color e-paper display and you can get a lot less noise than that by better dithering). The interesting thing is that back in the film days you took your 12 pictures and sent them off to the lab, and two or three days later you found out if any of them were great. This gives some of that "wait for it" kind of feel back to the photography. And at least for me, I think longer about taking a shot if I won't know instantly if its good or not :-)
Very cute idea. I would expect that with a 15 second develop time and no live display preview some kind of optical viewfinder would be very helpful. I love seeing weird cameras.
Great work! About two hours ago, I was listening to "Générique" by Miles Davis (jazz) with a noisy, animated gradient background. The whole experience felt incredibly immersive. Now, this camera can bring that beautiful noise texture into photos with a single click. Add some clever motion graphics and transform those photos into illustrative noisy textured gradients, it could become an amazing music visualizer for jazz lovers. I don't know why, but I'm really obsessed with noisy textures.
As a curiosity, "Générique" is not a name for a song. "Générique" is the word used in French for the music that plays over the intro opening credits of a movie or TV show episode.
GP’s “Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud” means “elevator for the gallows.” I think they are familiar with the composition, you might be missing the point of their comment.
It seems to be playing on Nostalgia, judging by these paragraphs like this one:
>The dithered photos look somewhere between a newspaper halftone and an old video game. The processing is part of the fun: you watch the colors come in one by one, like a digital polaroid.
Frankly, it does seem like a very fun gimmick, but also highly impractical. But my adoration of this little thing might just come from a general longing of the low-tech, simple devices of the past.
There is a good amount of articles of how we worked towards one device for everything, and more are rediscovering single use devices.
One use case is it helps kids understand how things work, including using dvds, etc.
A low fidelity photo allows the imagination to fill in the picture. Insistent kids can relate to lower fidelity as their own writing and drawing evolves.
Restriction is a widely used technique in both art, and life. Consider black and white paintings, or generally paintings which only use shades of a single color? Why are they not using all the colors when they exist?
What about people who do challenging athletic endeavors with limitations? The ice guy climbed up to the base camp of Everest in just his shorts and slippers. Why not wear more?
What about minimalism as a way of life? Why not buy more if you have money?
One positive aspect of a camera like this is that it forces you to slow down. Because you can’t take 10 frames per second hoping to get some keepers, you become more intentional when shooting. I took a photography class where we were asked to cover the LCDs with cardboard, so that you couldn’t get an immediate feedback and slow down a bit. Another trick is to format memory cards so that they can only store a few exposures. Going slow sometimes is a good thing.
I thought I remembered that the first Leica digital cameras (very expensive) didn't have a screen at all. "Chimping" or checking the shot immediately after taking it was seen as some sort of crutch that "real" photographers didn't need.
But it looks like the Leicas always had a screen, so maybe I'm thinking of another brand.
You don’t deserve the downvotes for what is a wholly reasonable and not unusual question.
Art really demands constraints, simplicity is clarifying, ephemerality is provocative, and designing your own creative tools invites metacognition. Doing all of this with a highly capable computing device is fascinating, IMO: it’s hypothetical, alternative future stuff. This device is an art experiment, isn’t it?
I have a (still modestly expensive) full frame digital camera that I bought specifically for the purpose of using alternative lens techniques: a home-made tilt shift bellows, wide angle pinhole, vintage lenses, enlarger lenses, and my own simple adaptations of binocular eyepieces and simple achromats, which have an “early photography” vibe, not least because to design them I ended up reading about Daguerre, Chevalier and Wollaston. They have changed my perspective on photography.
There is IMO very little in the way of artistic inspiration to be found at the cutting edge unless you are going to at least partly subvert cutting edge tools to do things they weren’t designed for. So it follows that creative technology is likely to be something of a dialogue with transformation and limitation.
When John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats started recording albums to cassette on his portable Panasonic stereo, he got a sound that was so much more lo-fi than what could be obtained in a studio, or even with a more expensive recorder and microphone.
His genius was to realise he'd made a sound that most professional musicians would never bother with, and thus it became his own and his signature. I think not worrying so much about fidelity probably gave him more time to concentrate on the lyrics and music.
Most people carry one of history's most technologically-advanced cameras. How many can say they actually use it for something interesting?
> Most people carry one of history's most technologically-advanced cameras. How many can say they actually use it for something interesting?
Figuring out how to use a phone camera in creative practice is really an interesting challenge.
Photographers still don't even pay attention to their ancillary uses, to be honest; you can use them to collect materials and build photography plans. But they can also teach you a lot of stuff (particularly subject isolation and wide angle visualisation)
It's art. Sometimes, ease of use and perfection aren't the goals at all.
It's easy to take quickly take a series of as many very realistic photos as a person wants with a wide variety of digital cameras, including the ones were all have in our pocket supercomputers. We dial in the settings (if we want to), and then push the button to get instant results.
I can take twenty photos of a thing and instantly review them all as they happen. One of them is probably going to work for me; if not, I can keep shooting. And then, if I want to edit it later, I can do that: There's countless ways to mess around with photos in post-production. These are optimizations we can make that utilize aspects of the system's capabilities.
And that's a valid way to do things, but just because we have identified one valid way to (hopefully!) get one good photograph with one category of hardware doesn't mean that we've exhausted the possibilities.
This way is different. Push button, and get imperfect results eventually -- even the viewfinder itself is very late to the game. This adds friction to the system. Since the time-cost of reviewing each photo is significant instead of instant, this shifts the optimization path. I get to think about things like framing and composition without even being able to see the frame or the composition. I won't get to see the results until later. This might motivate me to work harder to get it right beforehand, while using my brain in interesting ways to predict what the result might be without instant feedback.
That's OK. There's no rules in art; it's fine for people to choose their own methods. And to be sure: There's no accounting for taste. Just because one method implies more work doesn't mean that it will get better results, or that others will find anything of merit with any of it at all.
Sometimes, the mere process of doing is art in and of itself. That's OK, too.
In terms of modernity: If I want a particular scene of a particular place, I don't have to take it myself. I don't have to get out of my chair to hire someone to do it for me, or I can just Google one up. And here in 2026: I can have the bot make something up that suits me.
We can elect to get that chair using laborious old methods from a particular time period (pre-lathe or post-lathe? do we get to use a block plane? maybe we're just using stone-age flint tools, instead?), or with new methods and electric machines, or by handing over money at IKEA.
These are all valid methods by which to get a thing to sit on and then talk shit about art.
You didn't take the time to review all the dimensions of the project then. It is never always worst on all dimensions, if at least includes the 'I made (part of) this myself' dimension. Even if it is objectively worst on everything else, e.g performance, price, popularity, etc then the person either learned something or at least had fun, and that's in itself valuable, to them, even though not to you nor necessarily anyone else.
cute. I'd like to see some photos without the dithering applied, as it looks similar to a regular dithered jpeg, like you'd see on
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
it would be fun to try out a few different algos for the colour space conversion.
It's kind of fun to note that those are dithered PNGs, not JPEGs.
That's good for this use as the lossy compression of JPEG is specifically geared towards working with smooth gradients of 24-bit photographs, and that kind of smoothness is a quality that dithered images just don't have.
PNG's compression loves finding same-color fields and [losslessly] compressing them so it does this business just fine.
Anyway, the website is nice and I like the style.
It reminds me a lot of early JPEG days in the BBS world, wherein: Flame wars.
Those who only had VGA displays (or less) strongly preferred GIFs because they tended to look "right" when displayed with their predefined 256 color palette, whereas a combination of JPEGs and bad dithering by lazy display software took longer to load and looked far worse on the same systems. They were very loud with this preference.
Meanwhile, everyone with a truecolor display was quite certain that these GIF-loving folks were insane for their fondness of storage- and bandwidth-wasting 8-bit GIFs. It was clearly evident that JPEG was superior in every way for photographs, and that it was here to stay, and that that those who were limited to VGA really needed to learn to shut the hell up and spend that effort on getting a real video card instead. ;)
I think that's just how prints from a transparent filament usually look like, at least in my experience. What looks like under-extrusion are just bubbles of air. You can print with transparent filament (mostly) without bubbles, but it's much more tricky, see e.g. https://blog.prusa3d.com/3d-printed-lens-and-other-transpare...
It’s not the same product category and unlikely to cause confusion. Those are two of the major considerations in trademark law at least in the US. On the other hand, the rights holder has to vigorously defend the mark or lose it. That often leads to a bit of overreach rather than the opposite.
I don’t see any claim of trademark on the CSCS website about their framework. You can’t infringe what’s not claimed.
Copyright typically doesn’t cover names of things. That’s what trademarks or service marks are for.
> With ePaper, the photo on screen stays there even after powering off.
> The only way to clear the screen is to take a new photo.
>
> Source: https://reframe.camera
Thank you... dear developers, artists, people... for the marvel, art you do...
A color eink screen is a wonderful recalibration for a screen that kids can use compared to the overstimulation of an lcd, especially with touchscreen features.
Its a great idea, I think they should read the papers on dithering (I've got a color e-paper display and you can get a lot less noise than that by better dithering). The interesting thing is that back in the film days you took your 12 pictures and sent them off to the lab, and two or three days later you found out if any of them were great. This gives some of that "wait for it" kind of feel back to the photography. And at least for me, I think longer about taking a shot if I won't know instantly if its good or not :-)
I really enjoyed playing with dithering to get good results from the eink spectra displays with 6 or 7 colours.
They end up making good photo frames, especially for older digital photos.
Can you give some pointers to which papers specifically? I also have multiple e-paper displays and would love less noise
Very cute idea. I would expect that with a 15 second develop time and no live display preview some kind of optical viewfinder would be very helpful. I love seeing weird cameras.
Great work! About two hours ago, I was listening to "Générique" by Miles Davis (jazz) with a noisy, animated gradient background. The whole experience felt incredibly immersive. Now, this camera can bring that beautiful noise texture into photos with a single click. Add some clever motion graphics and transform those photos into illustrative noisy textured gradients, it could become an amazing music visualizer for jazz lovers. I don't know why, but I'm really obsessed with noisy textures.
Générique by Miles Davis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q73OSYyq5E0
Immersive noisy background: https://monopo.vn/
(I'm not affiliated with the site in any way. I just came across it on the Awwwards website: https://www.awwwards.com/inspiration/monopo-saigon-hypnotic-...)
As a curiosity, "Générique" is not a name for a song. "Générique" is the word used in French for the music that plays over the intro opening credits of a movie or TV show episode.
In this case, this would be the song that plays over the intro credits of "Ascenseur Pour l'Echaffaud" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051378/).
(Ie. Miles Davis might have several pieces of music all titled 'générique', for the various movies or shows where he contributed on soundtracks)
There is a specific composition from 1958 that miles davis called Générique. It was composed for elevator to the gallows.
GP’s “Ascenseur pour l’Échafaud” means “elevator for the gallows.” I think they are familiar with the composition, you might be missing the point of their comment.
I don't fully understand the obsession with making less-capable devices and talking about them as though being less capable is a feature by itself.
It seems to be playing on Nostalgia, judging by these paragraphs like this one:
>The dithered photos look somewhere between a newspaper halftone and an old video game. The processing is part of the fun: you watch the colors come in one by one, like a digital polaroid.
Frankly, it does seem like a very fun gimmick, but also highly impractical. But my adoration of this little thing might just come from a general longing of the low-tech, simple devices of the past.
Cameras are both gadgets and instruments of artistic impression, if you only measure them quantitatively you miss a lot.
These cameras can be fun the same way a toy piano might be fun to a virtuoso pianist. Something different.
Something doesn’t have to be for everyone.
There is a good amount of articles of how we worked towards one device for everything, and more are rediscovering single use devices.
One use case is it helps kids understand how things work, including using dvds, etc.
A low fidelity photo allows the imagination to fill in the picture. Insistent kids can relate to lower fidelity as their own writing and drawing evolves.
Restriction is a widely used technique in both art, and life. Consider black and white paintings, or generally paintings which only use shades of a single color? Why are they not using all the colors when they exist?
What about people who do challenging athletic endeavors with limitations? The ice guy climbed up to the base camp of Everest in just his shorts and slippers. Why not wear more?
What about minimalism as a way of life? Why not buy more if you have money?
This is just how humans are.
One positive aspect of a camera like this is that it forces you to slow down. Because you can’t take 10 frames per second hoping to get some keepers, you become more intentional when shooting. I took a photography class where we were asked to cover the LCDs with cardboard, so that you couldn’t get an immediate feedback and slow down a bit. Another trick is to format memory cards so that they can only store a few exposures. Going slow sometimes is a good thing.
These days you can flip the LCD facing inwards so it kinda feels like a film camera being viewfinder only.
I thought I remembered that the first Leica digital cameras (very expensive) didn't have a screen at all. "Chimping" or checking the shot immediately after taking it was seen as some sort of crutch that "real" photographers didn't need.
But it looks like the Leicas always had a screen, so maybe I'm thinking of another brand.
You don’t deserve the downvotes for what is a wholly reasonable and not unusual question.
Art really demands constraints, simplicity is clarifying, ephemerality is provocative, and designing your own creative tools invites metacognition. Doing all of this with a highly capable computing device is fascinating, IMO: it’s hypothetical, alternative future stuff. This device is an art experiment, isn’t it?
I have a (still modestly expensive) full frame digital camera that I bought specifically for the purpose of using alternative lens techniques: a home-made tilt shift bellows, wide angle pinhole, vintage lenses, enlarger lenses, and my own simple adaptations of binocular eyepieces and simple achromats, which have an “early photography” vibe, not least because to design them I ended up reading about Daguerre, Chevalier and Wollaston. They have changed my perspective on photography.
There is IMO very little in the way of artistic inspiration to be found at the cutting edge unless you are going to at least partly subvert cutting edge tools to do things they weren’t designed for. So it follows that creative technology is likely to be something of a dialogue with transformation and limitation.
When John Darnielle from The Mountain Goats started recording albums to cassette on his portable Panasonic stereo, he got a sound that was so much more lo-fi than what could be obtained in a studio, or even with a more expensive recorder and microphone.
His genius was to realise he'd made a sound that most professional musicians would never bother with, and thus it became his own and his signature. I think not worrying so much about fidelity probably gave him more time to concentrate on the lyrics and music.
Most people carry one of history's most technologically-advanced cameras. How many can say they actually use it for something interesting?
> Most people carry one of history's most technologically-advanced cameras. How many can say they actually use it for something interesting?
Figuring out how to use a phone camera in creative practice is really an interesting challenge.
Photographers still don't even pay attention to their ancillary uses, to be honest; you can use them to collect materials and build photography plans. But they can also teach you a lot of stuff (particularly subject isolation and wide angle visualisation)
It's art. Sometimes, ease of use and perfection aren't the goals at all.
It's easy to take quickly take a series of as many very realistic photos as a person wants with a wide variety of digital cameras, including the ones were all have in our pocket supercomputers. We dial in the settings (if we want to), and then push the button to get instant results.
I can take twenty photos of a thing and instantly review them all as they happen. One of them is probably going to work for me; if not, I can keep shooting. And then, if I want to edit it later, I can do that: There's countless ways to mess around with photos in post-production. These are optimizations we can make that utilize aspects of the system's capabilities.
And that's a valid way to do things, but just because we have identified one valid way to (hopefully!) get one good photograph with one category of hardware doesn't mean that we've exhausted the possibilities.
This way is different. Push button, and get imperfect results eventually -- even the viewfinder itself is very late to the game. This adds friction to the system. Since the time-cost of reviewing each photo is significant instead of instant, this shifts the optimization path. I get to think about things like framing and composition without even being able to see the frame or the composition. I won't get to see the results until later. This might motivate me to work harder to get it right beforehand, while using my brain in interesting ways to predict what the result might be without instant feedback.
That's OK. There's no rules in art; it's fine for people to choose their own methods. And to be sure: There's no accounting for taste. Just because one method implies more work doesn't mean that it will get better results, or that others will find anything of merit with any of it at all.
Sometimes, the mere process of doing is art in and of itself. That's OK, too.
In terms of modernity: If I want a particular scene of a particular place, I don't have to take it myself. I don't have to get out of my chair to hire someone to do it for me, or I can just Google one up. And here in 2026: I can have the bot make something up that suits me.
We can elect to get that chair using laborious old methods from a particular time period (pre-lathe or post-lathe? do we get to use a block plane? maybe we're just using stone-age flint tools, instead?), or with new methods and electric machines, or by handing over money at IKEA.
These are all valid methods by which to get a thing to sit on and then talk shit about art.
Constraints are where cool things are found
You didn't take the time to review all the dimensions of the project then. It is never always worst on all dimensions, if at least includes the 'I made (part of) this myself' dimension. Even if it is objectively worst on everything else, e.g performance, price, popularity, etc then the person either learned something or at least had fun, and that's in itself valuable, to them, even though not to you nor necessarily anyone else.
For these kinds of project, there are a few reasons:
1. Less opportunity to get distracted by other capabilities
2. More opportunity for experimentation with a new medium
3. Targeting an aesthetic rather than a technical specification
4. Trying to escape device addiction in its various forms
5. Using arbitrary constraints to develop new forms of artistic expression
cute. I'd like to see some photos without the dithering applied, as it looks similar to a regular dithered jpeg, like you'd see on https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
it would be fun to try out a few different algos for the colour space conversion.
Thanks for that website link, I really like dithered aesthetics. I will convert my entire photos into dithers. Thank you so much again.
It's kind of fun to note that those are dithered PNGs, not JPEGs.
That's good for this use as the lossy compression of JPEG is specifically geared towards working with smooth gradients of 24-bit photographs, and that kind of smoothness is a quality that dithered images just don't have.
PNG's compression loves finding same-color fields and [losslessly] compressing them so it does this business just fine.
Anyway, the website is nice and I like the style.
It reminds me a lot of early JPEG days in the BBS world, wherein: Flame wars.
Those who only had VGA displays (or less) strongly preferred GIFs because they tended to look "right" when displayed with their predefined 256 color palette, whereas a combination of JPEGs and bad dithering by lazy display software took longer to load and looked far worse on the same systems. They were very loud with this preference.
Meanwhile, everyone with a truecolor display was quite certain that these GIF-loving folks were insane for their fondness of storage- and bandwidth-wasting 8-bit GIFs. It was clearly evident that JPEG was superior in every way for photographs, and that it was here to stay, and that that those who were limited to VGA really needed to learn to shut the hell up and spend that effort on getting a real video card instead. ;)
It would be useful to include battery consumption and thermal performance during long recording sessions.
Reminds me of photos in games about 30 years ago…
ove the constraints—15 seconds to develop and one photo at a time makes it feel like a digital Polaroid. Great that it’s open source, too.
that 3d print seems to be under-extruded. I always wonder how can so many 3d print be so low quality. My 6+ year old ender5 will print so nice quality
I'm not a printer... What does that mean?
If the printer doesn't extrude sufficient volume for the speed it's moving at, the layer lines become thin and leave gaps. It's more apparent in this picture: https://qidi3d.com/cdn/shop/articles/under-extrusion.jpg
I think that's just how prints from a transparent filament usually look like, at least in my experience. What looks like under-extrusion are just bubbles of air. You can print with transparent filament (mostly) without bubbles, but it's much more tricky, see e.g. https://blog.prusa3d.com/3d-printed-lens-and-other-transpare...
Practicality aside, I really love this concept
Very cool! Any idea what the approximate battery life on this is?
is this a trademark/copyright violation of the name?
https://github.com/reframe-hpc/
It’s not the same product category and unlikely to cause confusion. Those are two of the major considerations in trademark law at least in the US. On the other hand, the rights holder has to vigorously defend the mark or lose it. That often leads to a bit of overreach rather than the opposite.
I don’t see any claim of trademark on the CSCS website about their framework. You can’t infringe what’s not claimed.
Copyright typically doesn’t cover names of things. That’s what trademarks or service marks are for.
This dithering could also be an interesting variation: https://dead.garden/blog/how-my-images-are-dithered.html
(Featured few days ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49006096)
Thank you... dear developers, artists, people... for the marvel, art you do...
Considering there are attempts to increase the frame rate on epaper screens, it would be interesting to see if that is possible with this.
A color eink screen is a wonderful recalibration for a screen that kids can use compared to the overstimulation of an lcd, especially with touchscreen features.
So is the goal to make ewaste now?
What is the point?
Make hay while the sun shines.
The topic of reasoning and solving the problem is described very well by you, but I think how it could be improved
Spam?