Open source cameras

Here’s a person interested in creating open source camera hardware and software. What else is out there for open source photography hardware?

* A recent announcement of a group at Stanford who have created an open source camera called the Frankencamera, or Camera 2.0. Here’s a press release about the Frankencamera.

The Frankencamera is aimed at researchers in the computational photography community, so they can develop new algorithms and publish them, and at teachers at the university level, so they and their students can play with these algorithms. Our goal is to start distributing cameras within 12-18 months, but the numbers will be small (dozens of cameras), they won’t be cheap ($1K if we’re lucky), and you’ll need to be an experienced programmer to use one.

* Elphel free software and open hardware, wth code on sourceforge, an irc channel and a wiki.

* Apertus open source cinema also looks promising!

Any other free/open source camera hardware and software projects out there? I see potential here both as a model for people creating open source accessible and assistive tech, and as a project that people with disabilities might want to put an oar in, early as possible in the project so that our own specs for usability are considered. If hardware is open source, we as people with disabilities might be able to hack and customize it more easily and to share those hacks with others, than we will be able to hack proprietary cameras.