There was once a race to put out cameras with ever higher numbers of megapixels to snare customers eager to take the highest quality digital photos. These days, we know that things like optics, processing, and finer qualities of an image sensor are all very important beyond pure resolution. But, for a time, companies behaved as if megapixels mattered over all else.
But what if you could go farther—shooting not millions, but billions of pixels in a single image? That’s precisely what [Yannick Richter] came to Hackaday Europe to talk about, covering his Project Gigapixel build.
More Pixels
When it comes to building a consumer camera with higher resolution, manufacturers achieve this by creating an image sensor with a greater number of sensing elements. This, of course, can get expensive and difficult the farther you want to scale, particularly if you’re trying to fit more sensing elements into a given standard sensor size.
A scanner sensor has great linear resolution. Pan one behind a high-quality lens, and you can capture images in super high resolution… just hope that nothing moves while you’re capturing a shot!
However, there are other ways to capture images in greater resolution that don’t require a larger image sensor. Namely, you can actually use quite a simple image sensor of limited resolution, and simply move it to various positions, capturing light all the while. Then, all you need to do is stitch the output together and you have a remarkably high resolution image. It might sound complicated, but as [Yannick] explains, it’s a perfectly cromulent way to build a gigapixel image.
[Yannick’s] project began with an old Epson flatbed scanner. This made the perfect donor for such a project, as it came with a linear image sensor with quite good resolution for scanning photographs and documents. The only problem is that it needs to move in a straight path in order to capture a full image. The goal was to build it into a scanner-style camera that was truly portable, which required some reverse engineering and creative design to make it into a practical tool for real-world photography. [Yannick] didn’t want to just stuff the existing scanner in a bodged-together camera body, either. He wanted to interface the sensor directly and build a custom linear-scanning camera from the ground up, with the high-resolution linear sensor mounted behind a nice medium-format Pentax lens.
[Yannick] lashed up a Raspberry Pi to read from the sensor.
The key was that the scanner in question—an Epson V370—used a Sony CCD scanning element, rather than a cheaper CIS element. A proper CCD sensor is more expensive, but produces better output, and is more suitable for the sort of imaging [Yannick] was trying to do with this build. Namely, by running the scanning element behind a medium format lens to capture incredibly high-resolution images at up to 40800 x 80000 pixels, or 3.2 gigapixels if you multiply it out.
The talk covers all the work that [Yannick] did to make this a fully functional camera. That included doing a deep dive into Epson documentation to figure out how to interface the sensor at all. Thankfully, service manuals provided enough detail on how the 12-line RGB sensor works to get the project over the line. Interfacing the sensor was achieved via reusing the ADC and timing generation hardware from the scanner itself, hooked up to a Raspberry Pi 5 and a RP2350.
Plenty of work was required to figure out how to properly offset all the R, G, and B pixels to line up properly into a coherent color image. [Yannick] also dives into the mechanical design, regarding how the sensor was assembled on a 100-millimeter linear drive to scan it behind the lens assembly to capture images. There were also issues generating a live preview that you’d get on any other digital camera, which is not exactly practical to generate from a scanning image sensor. Instead, a standard Raspberry Pi camera was included in the build for live preview to help with lining up a shot.
The camera is capable of taking incredibly high resolution images with rich detail. Of course, image sizes are hefty in turn.
Perhaps the best part of the talk is when [Yannick] shows off the final results. The simple fact is that 3.2 gigapixel images capture a ton of detail when they’re taken well and focused correctly. A simple shot of some benchtop instruments doesn’t look like anything special, until [Yannick] shows that cropping in will let you read the codes off a 0603 SMD resistor. Obviously, the camera is limited when it comes to speed and it can’t really capture moving objects well. However, when it comes to grabbing very high resolution shots of still scenes, it’s a great performer. If taking gorgeously detailed landscapes or stunning architectural shots is your thing, you might find such a build an appealing proposition for your own needs.
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