Remember the Game Boy Camera from right before the turn of the century, which let you take real-world photos that looked like pixel art images? It’s quite the charming toy from yesteryear, producing an aesthetic that many people still love to this day. The Pixless Camera is a new device that lets you take photos with a similar retro pixel art aesthetic.
That’s right, someone’s making a point-and-shoot camera that spits out pixelated images, so you can go out in the world and take photos that look like they’re a frame straight out of a Game Boy title. Whether you’re a retro gaming fan, a pixel art enjoyer, or a photographer looking to add something different to your arsenal, this thing sounds like it will make for a fun thing to pick up.
The Pixless Camera houses a tiny 0.03-megapixel sensor with a 35mm full-frame equivalent focal length to take all those pixelated photos, so it very closely approximates the Game Boy Camera, which came out with an even smaller 0.014-megapixel, two-bit sensor. Each photo it captures has a 256 x 128 resolution with up to 64 colors, with the images processed line by line in order to conserve RAM. Users can define any color palette that they want and upload it to the camera via SD card, although you can also download color palettes from the outfit’s web service via the companion app. Suffice to say, the combination of pixelated images and custom color palettes opens the door to a whole lot of creative imagery and experimentation, which sounds really fun.
The camera itself is quite minimalist, with just a shutter button on top, a power button, a small lens out front, and a one-inch monochrome OLED display in the back. The OLED panel can display alerts and messages, so you know what’s going on with the camera, as well as serve as a live view screen for framing your pixelated shots.
When you take a photo with the Pixless Camera, the image is automatically resampled using your custom color palette of choice, after which it’s enlarged by a factor of eight, which, they claim, helps avoid blurriness when the image is used in different devices. To finish, they encode it as a PNG file to ensure lossless compression without any artifacts. All images are saved directly to the SD card, so you can easily pop it in your laptop’s docking station for use in your own projects. The camera itself is tiny, measuring just 3.1 x 1.8 x 0.7 inches, so you can drop this in a pants pocket and carry it around with you all day, no problem. Heck, if you don’t mind pixelated souvenir photos, you can use it as an excellent travel camera.
According to the outfit, they also plan to create a Pro version of the camera with more advanced features like a wider lens, an actual electronic viewfinder, and physical in-camera controls for ISO and shutter speed. For now, though, they’re sticking with the barebones approach for this initial release, which, given how unique the camera is, probably wouldn’t be that much of an issue – there’s a definite audience out there waiting for something like this.
A Kickstarter campaign is currently running for the Pixless Camera. You can reserve a unit for pledges starting at $73.
