Open Reflex: a mirror camera printed on a 3D printer

250 grams of ABS plastic for 3D printing, a few screws and nuts, a small mirror, magnets, pieces of sheet plastic, black sealant, as well as a 3D printer and cutting plotter, glass cutter, screwdrivers and emery paper - this is almost a complete set of materials and tools, With the help of which you can build a 35-mm film reflex camera Open Reflex.

Detail drawings and detailed assembly instructions are published on the instructables website under a Creative Commons license - a 100% Open Source camera. According to the author of the project, French designer and hacker Leo Marius, it takes about 15 hours to print and assemble the device. The total cost of materials for creating a camera is about $ 30.


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This is not the first camera Leo Marius, printed on a 3D-printer. A couple of years ago he made a wall , or pinhole-camera - a device without a lens, the most primitive type of camera, which appeared at the dawn of photographic equipment, but is sometimes used even now in artistic photography. Instead of lenses, this camera has a tiny hole. It can only be photographed at very high exposures, since very little light falls on the photosensitive element.


One of the test photos taken with Open Reflex

The most difficult element of the Open Reflex camera was the shutter. This shutter is a very complex and delicate mechanism. Leo Marius had to come up with a completely original design, in which, besides the printed parts, a piece of film and wheels from a fingerboard are used . The resulting shutter has a fixed holding time of approximately 1/60 of a second. In the future, Leo Marius plans to deal primarily with the improvement of the shutter. He also plans to provide the camera with e-filling based on the Arduino.



Camera Open Rflex uses interchangeable lenses factory made. Leo Marius did not aim to create a homemade lens, but the Japanese Yuki Suzuki was not afraid of that either. The body of its lens is printed on a 3D printer, and the lenses are made of transparent acrylic. The photos obtained with its help can hardly be called quality, however, the main goal of the project, as in the case of Open Reflex, is not an attempt to compete with photo equipment manufacturers, but a study of the possibilities of 3D printing and the excitement of a homemade company trying to recreate a high-tech product at home.