Hands On: Digi Swap Makes Old Film Cameras Digital
The Digi Swap made some waves when it debuted earlier this year ahead of the fully remote CP+ Camera and Photo Imaging Show. The Kickstarter-funded(Opens in a new window) accessory is high-concept—it matches your iPhone with an antique film camera, so you can use the smartphone's lens to take photos and skip the hassle of finding a film lab or dealing with at-home film processing. The device also promises to save you from the ever-rising cost of working with photographic film—Fujifilm is set to raise film prices(Opens in a new window) by 25% in the US and by as much as 60% in other parts of the world. But, based on our experience with a prototype, the project falls a bit short of its lofty ambitions.
For some, the Digi Swap is a dream concept because old, purely manual cameras are fulfilling to use in a way that digital cameras simply aren't—there's nothing quite like winding the film advance of a Leica M3 and feeling the tension as the lever advances the hand-fit gears inside.
Perhaps it's because of this love for vintage, battery-free technology that we've seen concepts like the Digi Swap before. The Re35(Opens in a new window) made an April Fools' Day debut back in 2011, for instance, and fooled plenty of folks. It promised to add a digital sensor to any 35mm camera, but was simply a concept from a design house—there was never a real product behind the marketing.
The Re35 proved inspirational, though. Others took swings at bringing digital sensors to old cameras; the I'm Back 35 from 2018 is the most recent example. The crowd-funded digital back featured a standalone sensor, but is no longer available for purchase.
The Digi Swap is something you can buy, though, in the form of a Kickstarter product. You just need to
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