oookay, bit of a long-form geekery post, but it does (nearly) explain why I am sharing shitty greyscale pictures for a while...
way back (vertical wavy-lines go here) I purchased a Casio WristCam - the WQV-1 specifically.
It took 120x120 pixel greyscale images, but was also the size of a (slightly bulky) watch.
It could also share these via infrared.
I had a Palm Pilot with infrared.
This *Worked* really well.
I took many pictures.
23 years go by (vertical wavy-lines go here) and stuff changes.
My Palm Pilot communicated mostly via IR as my laptop at the time had IR, my Nokia phones had IR, my WristCam had IR.
All was peachy and communication just happened.
That laptop is RIP (Pentium 133...) and most of the rest is now souvenirs of a more geeky time...
until I moved house.
and found the watch.
and its box.
containing the software.
and found the infrared serial adaptor.
and was prompted by Spangolin / @35millimetre about a photos-on-crap-kit project...
things joined together.
uh oh.
So far, so promising.
I have all the bits, should be pretty simple getting a never-used infrared adaptor made before the turn of the century working with modern kit via a usb-serial adaptor, right?
software built for venerable versions of Windows with hardcoded serial ports running on a modern, usb-only laptop with a flavour of Linux should fly, right?
getting a watch unused since 2008 (new battery added to check it was working, but no way to get the pics off, so abandoned) to live again, right?
@evilstevie this looks awesome
@matsimpsk it was amazing at the time. digital photography in 2000 was odd, and this was a pretty good attempt by Casio to remain relevant.
full geekery-meets-007 points for the time, and it talking to everything else via irda was amazing.
I'm waiting on a replacement 18mm watchstrap to land (original is a bit stiff now, not too comfy, and I suspect will start to crack with any use).
then the comedy starts.
from previous use - it thrives on light and contrast, and everything is in focus.
@matsimpsk it was the immediacy vs film cameras at the time.
you could see in near-realtime what the result was, and it was amazing.
I waited until Sony brought out their first dslr to learn photography properly because I tend to learn by brute-forcing and this made the feedback loop into seconds-for-hundreds-of-photos rather than the film week-for-36-photos and trying to remember what changes I'd made between shots.
serious respect to any self-taught photographers in the film days.
@evilstevie yeah, I remember using a QuickTake 100 way back in the day. They were super expensive and the quality was terrible, but something about them was magic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_QuickTake