New York City photographed with the Game Boy Camera in 2000 | Hacker News Reader

New York City photographed with the Game Boy Camera in 2000

ironicsans.com

238 pointssmacktoward31 comments

The linked colour pictures are also pretty neat.

http://www.ironicsans.com/2007/09/idea_color_photos_with_the...

Awww man...I've got a gameboy camera lying around as well, and I have that Mad Catz cable adapter he's talking about, but I could never get it to work :(

Also, his method reminds me of these old Russian photographs:

http://petapixel.com/2014/03/10/incredible-color-photographs...

Neil young's Silver & Gold album cover was shot by Neil's daughter Amber with a Game Boy Camera.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_%26_Gold_(Neil_Young_alb...

Wow, that is actually really cool.

I remember seeing ad's for this camera when it came up, but never actually saw a picture from it until recently. I really love that weird tech like this existed.

It's cool that he incorporated his daughter's efforts and the result is pretty artsy. Cool article by OP too.

I thought he only liked hi-res ;) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_%28digital_music_service%2...

Great demonstration of "toy level camera tech" 14 years ago!

The interesting thing about the sensor in these things (Mitsubishi M64282FP) is that it has an analog output, so it's capable of much higher bit depth than in Nintendo's implementation of it. There are various other (mostly robot vision) projects using it that you can find on the Internet, and you'll see that the images are far less pixelated.

I also think it's rather amazing how much the tech has progressed - 15 years ago, the cost of a 128 x 123 (there's 5 black lines probably for BLC) - 16KP - monochrome array fixed-focus sensor module would be around the same as a 5MP AF colour module today, of the type used in smartphones.

Sounds interesting. Can you explain how a higher bit depth is used to produce images with less pixelation (higher resolution)?

It's not about resolution. Part of the reason those images look so pixelated is because they're quantized down to 2 bits per pixel: you only get white, light gray, dark gray, and black. Any intermediate shades have to be represented by dithering, which is what creates that stippled, checkered appearance.

If the images had the same resolution but higher bit depth, you wouldn't be able to make out much more detail, but the images would be a lot smoother and less blocky-looking.

EDIT: I used today's Wikipedia featured picture as an example.

Original: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kumar_Anish.jpg

256x256, 8 bits per pixel: http://i.imgur.com/YVIS2g3.png

256x256, 2 bits per pixel: http://i.imgur.com/iTFslZx.png

256x256, 2 bits per pixel, with dithering: http://i.imgur.com/LnlmORI.png

I imagine this is because the original Gameboy only had a 2 bit color palette.

Right. The Game Boy Color changed that, but it wasn't black-and-white.

The subway speeding past photo is interesting- the door is clearly slanted to one side. Is this an artifact of the camera scanning line-by-line relatively slowly? Or something else?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_shutter

Common on certain types of digital cameras today as well (especially smaller ones like mobile phones and P&S cameras).

> Is this an artifact of the camera scanning line-by-line relatively slowly?

Yes!

Wow. I remember that cam.

Fun to do. Put one of those pics on your screen and walk back a few meters. For example the picture of the guy in the subway sleeping. You'll notice the details start appearing because your brain is filling in the details.

A music video created with a gameboy camera: http://vimeo.com/19868821

It's also worth noting that the gameboy camera also contained a very weird and limited sequencer called trippy-H, which you accessed by first completing an objective (take so many photos or make an animation or something).. and then shooting the right thing in the shooting game.

Here's a demo of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SDQ7vF5CIQ

I loved that the gameboy camera had a ton of completely hidden weirdness (pre-internet!) which you found out and shared with your friends.

This reminds me of another cool toy camera, the PXL-2000 - which recorded digital video onto a compact audio cassette tape.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000

I went to a PXL-2000 film festival about 15 years ago in Vancouver which was absolutely brilliant. It's amazing how creative people get when forced to deal with constraints.

Speaking of constraints, the camera apparently had a problem with its RF filter, which resulted in a lot of static when you were recording to the audio tape. Someone figured out you could hack in your own RCA video out connector, so most of the films shot with the camera have been modded to get a better picture. Here's a link on how to mod one: http://users.speakeasy.net/~joem/Pxl/guide.html

My best friend had one of these as a kid and we made epic backyard GI Joe movies.

Incidentally he now works as a film editor.

That's amazing to me, I had no idea video cams were able to store video on one of the old audio cassettes. I'd always assumed higher density tape was required.

I used to own one of those as a kid. I used it to create stop animation of my toys. My family still talks about that to this day.

Here's a web app that will "gameboyify" a photo

http://www.tabletop-pixel.com/retroizer/

http://i.imgur.com/0IAaSYp.png

Quality doesnt seem to be that much different from the first ever digital camera, the cromemco cyclops (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_CYCLOPS). Judged by the few examples that can be found via Google images, that is.

Incidentally, that camera used rather interesting technology. Its sensor was a regular CMOS ram chip with the opaque cover replaced by a transparent one. Bits would flip back from 1 to 0 due to the light projected onto it.

I had one of those back in the day. It wasn't just a camera, it also had some amazingly rudimentary photo editing capabilities, which were fun, as well as lots of amazingly weird games.

If you'll excuse the Cracked link, there are also some weird easter eggs: http://www.cracked.com/article_19332_7-creepy-video-game-eas...

I've been wondering for a long time why Nintendo never went ahead and made a smart phone. This really cool blog post sort of twisted the knife to me about their possible missed opportunity.

Url changed from http://www.designboom.com/art/game-boy-camera-photographs-05..., which pointed to something that pointed to this.

Submitters: HN prefers original sources. Please check what you post for cases where it's just pointing to something else.

The current URL is far more interesting with its links to his colour photographs.

I've been following his blog for a few years now. He's done some other really neat stuff like histogram work (http://www.ironicsans.com/2007/09/idea_the_histogram_as_the_...) and sort of an inverse Tetris (http://www.ironicsans.com/2009/01/i_wrote_it_you_made_it_mon...). Then there are the inventor profiles (http://www.ironicsans.com/interview/).

A script for generating images with self-similar histograms (read the first article!) - http://www.joshmillard.com/2007/10/04/retro-histo-making-an-...

The histogram work is awesome. I know of some people that would love this for crypto-puzzles.

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