We all know someone who is into photography and swears by how much better film cameras are compares to their digital conter parts and I must admit; the comparisons I have seen are convincing. However whenever I have toyed with the idea of getting into photography the entry price seems way too high and especially film feels like the deep end to start from, but I do find the idea of imperfect capture of reality interesting.
On unrelated note: we are all aware of dithering. It was very succesflly used in Return of the Obra Dinn and a while back I played around with it and created a web tool to dither images.
Glad you asked. In my mind dithering scartches the same place as film. It is older "format" with limits on how it can represent reality and it captures the "mood" of the image very well. Dithering digital images also gets around paying multiple euros per developed film picture and if you get rid of the original image the moment is as ephemeral as with film.
There are plenty of apps for your phone to dither images and there are even more computer software and websites that can do it for you as well. However you have to first take a image (or a dozen) and the manipulate them to get to the desired end result. I feel this fights against the whole premis of taking photographs of moments and moods. What if there was a way to just take dithered images, maybe with a dedicated device?
With this tiny device I can take dithered pictures and view the image off of this 250x122 1bit e-Ink display. It has a battery so I can take it to places and it takes pictures that are more about the feeling and mood than anything else
As you may have guessed from the initial pictures this is built on top of Raspberry Pi Zero.
Following links are to Amazon.de, but not affiliate links
All source code is available at totu/dithercamera. However there is nothing magical about it. It leverages the rapsberry pi's built in PiCamera module to get the image bytes and just feeds them into Waveshare's epd2in13_V4 demo library. Then saves the same bytes as BMP on the disk.
Only even slightly fancy part is the XSLT image gallery to show taken pictures in a Web UI.
As per usual I have a laundry list of improvement ideas
But I most likely won't get to any of these. I feel that the itch has been scratched and I even have parts of future V2 using ESP32 and a bit larger e-Ink display, but we shall see if I ever get to that project.
However I am planning on upgrading the current web ditherer I have to include some new dithering modes, but I think I should now spend more time going outside and taking some pictures so I can better asses the future needs.