German computer engineer and builder Yannick Richter, who goes by Gigawipf online, built a new 3,200-megapixel 3D-printed medium-format camera that relies on a linear CCD scanner. As Gigawipf describes it, the camera, Project Gigapixel, is much more than just a scanner in a box, though.

This is not the first time a photographer has built a high-resolution camera using the CCD sensor from a professional Epson flatbed scanner. Still, Richter argues that his project is unique because of the reverse-engineering process he used to make his DIY camera more practical and higher-resolution than prior efforts.

Instead of simply putting original scanner hardware inside a camera, Richter took the CCD from an Epson V-series 4800DPI scanner, reverse-engineered its timing protocol, wrote new software, and replaced most of the scanner’s components with new ones purpose-built for photographic applications. He also had to make the CCD sensor work with an entirely new interface, which, as outlined in the video above, required significant work.

At the heart of the Project Gigapixel camera is a big 12-line ILX561K CCD sensor, which captures high-resolution scans by building an image one line at a time, physically moving the image sensor along the scanning bed as it goes. Granted, rolling shutter sensors, like the ones found in nearly all mirrorless cameras, also build images one line at a time, but much faster than a scanner and not by physically moving the sensor itself.

Richter’s camera naturally shrinks down the means by which the scanner’s CCD sensor moves, but it still maintains extreme resolution. The camera can capture images up to 80,000 x 40,000 pixels, or 3,200 megapixels (3.2 gigapixels), provided that a medium-format 6×7 lens is attached to cover the large image circle. Richter says he uses Pentax Asahi 6×7 lenses because they have fully manual aperture control and are “comparably cheap for true medium format lenses.”

In pursuit of making this incredible scanner camera more like a traditional camera, Richter gave his camera a small CSI camera mounted to the same focal plane as the CCD as a focus helper for live view, added a touchscreen, built a user interface, installed an NVMe SSD, and wrote robust software to provide control over scan resolution, width, and settings.

In a post on Reddit, Richter, who goes by Ultrawipf instead of Gigawipf on Reddit, commented that when shooting a full-resolution photo using his new camera, it can take over 30 minutes for capture and encoding. However, it may become faster if a Raspberry Pi limitation can be overcome. The full-size 3,200-megapixel photo is about 19GB uncompressed. A preview scan, which is about 3,500 pixels tall, takes about 10 seconds.

The image on the right is a 100% crop from a full-resolution image Richter captured with his Project Gigapixel camera.

As the comments on Reddit’s Raspberry Pi community show, what Richter has accomplished here is exceptional.

“This is insanely impressive. The level of engineering behind integrating a scanner CCD with a Pi 5 is wild,” says one Redditor. “Hats off to you for making it portable too.”

As expected, the practical use cases for a camera like this are not as varied as a traditional camera with a standard image sensor. However, a large-format scanner camera like this can capture exceptionally high-resolution photos of stationary subjects, like buildings, still life, and certain landscape scenes.

Richter says he wanted to build this camera because it is a “unique and fun challenge,” and, as far as he knows, no other similar project has been done from scratch.

“By interfacing the CCD controller directly, I get the raw data and can (have to) process it myself and can implement new modes like the linecam mode with the sensor standing still and control the movement directly for the preview cam,” the engineer explains.

The camera has a large touchscreen and a custom user interface.

In total, his materials costs came to around €570, which, as Richter explains, is a far cry from what a modern 100-megapixel medium-format camera costs. And 100 megapixels is way less than 3,200.

The Project Gigapixel — Linear CCD Camera project is detailed in full on Hackaday.

*Image credits: Yannick Richter (Gigawipf). Richter also has a Patreon. *