Filling The Gaps: The 72MP, 4K Digital Scamera

Filling The Gaps: The 72MP, 4K Digital Scamera

This always happens to me: I had this urge (again) to try some circuit bending. This involves getting a cheap digital camera, taking it apart and poking some wires into the connectors on the sensor, which if done right can produce some lovely glitchy images, but if done wrong can wreck the camera, so it has to be a device that you don't mind possibly losing. The snag is, whenever I get one of these digicams I always end up really liking it, so I can't bear to dig into it and it remains as a part of my 'collection'.

The used electrical discount store CEX (Computer Exchange) is an excellent source for cheap digicams. In addition to specific models, quite often they offer 'generic' digital cameras for just a few Euros, and whenever one of these appears on the website I am tempted to get it. The thing is, you don't know what you're going to get. It might be a no-name brand camera fit for the bin, or sometimes an absolute classic, like the mint condition Canon Powershot G5 that arrived for just 3€. The point being, that although I always intend to get one of these cameras for circuit bending I always end up 'falling in love' with it, and not having the nerve to potentially destroy it. 

Anyhow. Last weekend a 12MP 'generic' digital camera appeared on the CEX website for 10€.  Normally, I would be reluctant to pay so much for a digicam, but this time I wanted some decent resolution and this seemed to fit the bill. When the package arrived, it was quite heavy, and I wondered if it might be a decent camera again, like something from the Canon Powershot range. It was something even better; a '72MP' Chinese made scamera. 

I first noticed these appearing on reputable websites in Portugal like Worten and Fnac when I was looking for a decent resolution digital camera for myself a couple of years ago. At the time they were priced at well over 100€, although often as not were heavily discounted. It was obvious it was a scamera, though not as blatant as those 35mm 'Cannon' cameras that were around a while ago, cheap plastic fixed lens 'SLRs' with a lead weight in the bottom that made them heavier.

Advertised as a, '4K Digital Camera for Photography, 72MP Autofocus Vlogging Cameras for YouTube with 64GB SD Card and Battery, 18X Digital Zoom 2.8" 270° Flip Screen Compact Travel Camera for Teens', they would pop up in the 'marketplace' of these websites. When I can, I generally  avoid tge marketplace, since they're  often Chinese sites offloading tat at vastly inflated prices. And this was no different. It's a terrible sounding description. That entry was from Amazon, where it's on sale for $36, but I'm certainly not going to provide a link for it. No one deserves that. 

In the hand the '72M MEGA PIXELS' scamera feels 'plasticky' and looks nothing like a quality camera should look. The camera can be turned on just by flipping the back open or, if the LCD screen is revealed, with an on/off button on the top. Incidentally, the red circled button is not the power button, that's to record video. The shutter button is the big button on the top front, with the 'zoom' toggle. That does nothing, apart from digitally zoom the image. The 'welcome' screen is the tackiest opening screen I've ever seen, and the switch off screen is the same ('bye bye'). The scamera beeps and chirps with a cheap-sounding tune, and the shutter sound is hopelessly synthetic. 

The lens is amazing, and not in a good way. Described as, '5-axis stabilizer, 5K ultra HD, 3.95mm f1.8', this lens looks like it's a simple lens that projects straight onto a small sensor, like you'd get on a toy camera. Which I'm pretty sure it is. Although it says 5K on the lens, on the body the video resolution is described as 4K. I've not tested the video, or the sound quality, but I'm sure that it's not either, at least not without a whole package of electronic jiggery-pokery. Which brings me to the claim of 72MP resolution.  Is it? I suspect not.

If you take a typical 72MP image, the file size is 9856×7,392, or 72,855,552 pixels. But when you zoom in to that image it's full of artifacts, so there's certainly something going on there. I took a full frame image at 72MP, and a second at the lowest resolution offered by the scamera of 8MP. I zoomed each image to roughly the same size, and compared them. At 8MP, the zoomed image is 'sharp-ish', with details in the plaster and glass pieces in the globe. It's still full of 'rubbish', mind you. At 72MP, which from a true 72MP you would expect to be filled with detail, it's a mess. I suspect there's been a lot of 'upsampling' going on here, where the software in the scamera interpolates and creates new pixels based on existing ones. This adds more pixels to make a much larger image but does not add any further resolution. So by my rough reckoning, this is at best an 8MP sensor. Truly, a scamera.

I took the scamera out and about during a trip to Oiã on a lovely sunny day, and here are the results. The images here have been resized to 1366 pixels at the longest edge, so there's no 72MP here (not that there ever was, anyhow). The colours came out quite delightfully, actually, and I really liked how it appeared. I was very confused with the one image of the water tower, mind. This was taken in daytime but it looks like night. I did actually try to check out the infrared response of the scamera, and there was a horrible 'hot spot' in the middle of the image, so this may well be light reflecting in the lens.

In conclusion, I finally got my hands on the 72MP digital scamera, a device I had been interested in learning about for a while. At 10€, it was still overpriced, and the scamera is truly a horrendous beast with absolutely zero appeal. Will I use it for circuit bending? Well, actually, although I was reluctant at first to do this, now I'm thinking that it might be a worthy contender. One of these days, I'm going to open it up, just to see what it's like inside, and we'll go from there.

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