3 ms·

I got really excited for a moment, as I have been looking for something like this for a long time. Unfortunately it turns out to be an old April fools joke.

• stan_rogers 15y ago
  It (or, rather, something very like it) was an actual product at one time, but it needed to be a per-camera product to make it work properly. The 135 format standard says how big the frames should be and how many sprocket holes per frame, but not how the frames align with the sprocket holes or exactly how much distance there should be between the film canister and the lightbox. Getting the sensor aligned with the lightbox (and the viewfinder) basically meant a different model for each of the various SLR cameras out there. The sensor itself was pretty low-rez and had little in the way of dynamic range. Oh, and since things were so inefficient at the time, you needed to butcher the camera (drilling a hole in the baseplate) to feed power to the canister-cum-senor (and, if I recall correctly, to get the data out). It didn't make it past the "floating a trial balloon" stage in the marketplace.