Even more VuPoint toy camera goodness

Yep, it's time for another batch of pics from the VuPoint keychain digicam I picked up for $14.99 a while back, taken mostly around Jamison Square in the Pearl.



I guess if we're going to pick nits, the price is really $14.99 plus the cost of a computer, plus the price of an image manipulation app unless you use a free one. The VuPoint usually overexposes stuff, so I ran most of these through GIMP (which is free). I don't think that counts as cheating, really. Besides, I restricted myself to darkening the pics a bit with the Levels tool, and sometimes boosting color saturation with the Hue-Saturation tool, but other than that they're exactly as the camera spit them out.



Previous batches of VuPoint pics here, here, and here.



The stuffed animal you see here is Firefox schwag I picked up at OSCON. This was taken with the wide-angle doodad I picked up for my real camera. I don't think the wide angle is very obvious with this photo though. You can also see how noisy the VuPoint's photos get in dim light situations, like indoors at night. And this isn't even close to the worst example. What I think it's probably doing is boosting the ISO sky high to compensate. Your expensive digital camera could do that too if it wanted to, but perfectionist types out there would complain about the noise if it did, and besides, your fancy camera has one of them newfangled "flash" thingies, and the VuPoint doesn't.

More VuPoint fun

More photos taken with that $14.99 digital camera I picked up a while ago. The top photo and the last two were taken through that infrared filter I cobbled together. It's odd how IR photos taken with my usual camera come out in a range of pink, lilac, and orange tones, while with the VuPoint they come out sort of black and white.

If nothing else, the photos show that the camera's viewfinder image is a very, very rough approximation of what the end result is going to look like. You never know what you're going to get. It's like a box of chocolates, or whatever.

Meanwhile, I was at the antique store earlier today and picked up another new toy. Cute, huh? There are also some larger pics of the flash version. The thing uses 620 film, which can be tricky to come by. There's a camera store in town that does 120 -> 620 film conversions, so maybe that'll work for this lil' beastie and maybe it won't. I mostly got it as a shelf curio, but I just might take it out for a spin some time. I realize I've said repeatedly I have no interest in dealing with film cameras ever again, but I might make an exception now and then. Purity is so uninteresting, after all...







The above photo was taken through an especially wavy wine bottle. It's not camera distortion, though that would be a reasonable guess.







Here's those IR photos I mentioned...

...wherein I gain a superpower...

When I was a kid, I thought being able to see infrared and ultraviolet would be a great superpower. X-ray vision, not so much, because it'd be all skeletons all the time, and I've never been goth enough to find that appealing. A couple of weeks ago I was surprised to learn that my camera detects near-IR light. Which got me wondering if there was a way to make it only see infrared. Hopefully without having to spend a lot of money or disassemble anything.

Turns out there's an extremely simple way to do just that. I rifled through my dusty old box of film photos, and looked through my negatives until I found a couple of unexposed end bits. Layer them together and add some tape to hold them in place, and you've got a homemade IR filter. If you try to look through it you'll notice that almost no visible light makes it through, so anything the camera sees has to be something else.

So here are a few preliminary attempts at taking IR photos.

The thing that really stands out in IR is foliage, and fortunately my general neighborhood is full of foliage. Leaves appear to glow, while the sky comes out rather dark. Here's that damn Leland One / Rusting Chunks No. 5 sculpture again. The trees in direct sunlight just then came out way overexposed. If I hadn't done that, I'm not sure the rest of the scene would've been visible.



Here are some subsequent and better attempts.







Here are a few pages with tons of info about IR photos, if you're interested, at Rochester Institute of Technology, dpfwiw, Photo tidbits, CoCam, and PhotoNotes.org


A funny thing about IR with digital cameras is that the more you spend, generally speaking, the less useful the camera is. Infrared is Considered Harmful for general camera usage, so you see IR-blocking filters fixed over cameras' image sensors. The more you spend, the "better" IR filtering you get. I think even mine does it to some degree, so you've got IR and anti-IR filters fighting each other, and you're detecting what little light makes it through both of those.

My dinky little $14.99 VuPoint camera, however, doesn't seem to do any IR-blocking at all, based on the experimenting I've done so far. I didn't bring the right cable with me so I can't pull today's photos off of it right now, but here are a couple of silly ones from earlier. First, my alter ego in mid-transmogrification into IR superhero mode, film sprocket holes and everything:



The completed transformation, FWIW:



Incidentally, I've noticed the VuPoint is better suited to talking to Macs than it is to Windows, which is kind of surprising. The desktop software on Windows is clunky and cartoonish, while on OSX it just talks to iPhoto like a good camera should. The resulting images are BMP files on OSX, but JPG on Windows, even though BMP is a Windows-centric format. I figure that means BMP is the camera's "RAW" format, or the closest thing to it. Apparently if you leave compression off on the camera, the desktop software applies it on that end, so there's really no advantage to turning it off in that case. I don't really see the point of that; the BMP files come out at around 360k instead of the ~50k compressed size. 360k is still pretty tiny, so I'm not sure why they went to the trouble.

Unboxing a $14.99 VuPoint digicam

So I was in the mood for a new toy, and I remembered the camera store down the street had these $14.99 digital cameras that fit on a keychain. You can't go wrong for $14.99. Crappy image quality is fine. Crappy image quality is great, actually. Call it Holga envy if you like. Dealing with camera film is annoying and tedious, and I'm not, not, not going to do it, period, no matter how funky and weird the results are. I'd still like funky and weird results, though. And like I said, you can't go wrong for $14.99.

So the top photo is of my new VuPoint Solutions DC-ST12G-VP, with the single AAA battery out. AAA batteries are pretty tiny, so you can tell this is a very small camera.



And here's the packaging. I'm proud to report I've opened at least one modern made-in-China product package without a knife of any kind. I just improvised with my keychain bottle opener instead.

Oh, and there's beer. You can't unbox a new toy without beer. It's a McMenamins Firefly Kolsch, with a lemon wedge. Hey, it's hot outside.

It's kind of fun making a big production out of this at the same time the world's alpha nerds are unboxing their shiny new iPhones. I don't think this qualifies as satire, exactly. There's probably a word for it, which either escapes me at the moment, or I've just never heard of.



The pamphlet on the left is the manual. If you want to read the whole thing, such as it is, you can find a color version here. It's delivered as a PDF inside a ZIP file for some reason. Don't ask me why.

So I'm trying to see what else I can learn about the thing. I suppose with the idea I might take it apart and tinker with it eventually, or possibly buy another one to tinker with. The Windows desktop software installs to an odd location, C:\WINDOWS\twain_32\MyDSC2 instead of under Program Files. So I suppose it's using TWAIN to talk to the camera instead of one of the usual digicam interfaces. TWAIN's mostly used for talking to scanners, although it supports cameras too. So that's kind of peculiar.

The apps and DLLs in the folder indicate the software comes from another company, Service & Quality Technology Co. Ltd., based in Taiwan. Their website lists a variety of image sensor chips and whatnot, although the lowest-end one they list, the SQ905C, says it offers VGA resolution, not just the CIF mode my camera claims. The other details look about right, though, so it's possible the camera just doesn't expose the VGA mode. In which case enabling it might be an interesting project.

Updated: Ok, the SQ905C is the controller & platform the camera's based on, and the sensor's a separate item. Actually it could be any one of a short list of separate items. The tech docs (see below) list a few supported sensors: Hynix HV7131R, PixArt PAS202(B?) and PAS302B, something just listed as "106" which (I think) is supposed indicate PixArt's PAS106B, Micron's MI-360, and PQI's SOI763A. So it's possible that while the controller can support slightly higher resolution, the sensor in the camera may not be up to the job. The PAS106B supports only CIF ( 352 x 288 ) resolution, while all the others support VGA (640 x 480). So I probably have a PAS106B inside; if not, tweaking the max resolution may still be a go, not that I have a clear idea how to accomplish that right now.

I suppose there's always adding memory, although I imagine that would increase the drain on the poor little battery.

The SQ905C page links to a pair of PDF files with loads of technical data. There's a single ASIC inside that implements nearly the whole package, right down to the interface on the little LCD status screen. (It's just status, none of that fancy preview nonsense.) If this isn't precisely what's inside my camera, it may be the next generation, and mine uses a discontinued version. Which might explain the price, I suppose.

Actually one of the apps isn't from SQ. Judging by a quick Google search, TransTWAIN.exe seems to be a common tool for transferring files over a TWAIN interface or something like that. It's freely distributed in binary form, but it's not known who wrote the thing. Jeepers!

So here's the first photo from my shiny new $14.99 camera:



Pretty cool, huh? That's full size, without JPEG compression enabled. The camera can hold about 18 photos in this mode. It's SDRAM-based, so if the camera loses power, your photos go poof. That also means the camera constantly draws current if there's a battery present, since otherwise the contents of memory would go poof. So you'll want to take the battery out once you've downloaded the camera's precious cargo.

No camera unboxing would be complete without a photo of the camera you used for the start of the process, taken with the new camera. So here ya go:



Yes, yes, I had a kolsch and a light summery pasta for lunch. Did I mention it's really hot outside?

---

So here are the functions exported by the DLLs and kernel drivers that came with the camera, for you tech dweebs out there. Obviously I don't know what they're all for, but some of the names sound interesting.


TOYCAM.DLL: (you gotta love that name.)

DSCClear
DSCEnd
DSCFreeJPGBuf
DSCGet
DSCGetImage
DSCGetJPGImage
DSCInit
DSCIsReady
DSCStart
GetToyCamInfo
InitHW
PCCEnd
PCCGet
PCCInit
PCCIsReady
PCCStart
ReadLanguage
ResetHW
ResetHW1
ResetHW2
SQImageOption
SaveToAVI
SetDSCParam
TCamIsReady
TCamSetWiaMode
TCamWorkingPath
doRGBAdjust


USBDSC.DLL:

SQAreReady
SQBulkRead
SQBulkWrite
SQFreeDS
SQInitDS
SQInitWorkingPath
SQIsDriverAlive
SQReadDSC
SQReadDownloadPAT
SQReadFirmwareVer
SQReadPAT
SQReadPCC
SQStartDSC
SQStartPCC
SQStopDSC
SQStopPCC
SQVendorCommand
SQWriteData


SQDLL.DLL:

CheckMMX
CheckSSE
ColorMatrixMul3s
SQAG_020515_UP
SQAWB_020605_UP
SQAWB_030827_8b
SQAWB_040210_8b
SQBLD_020606_UP
SQBrightness_UP
SQColorGain
SQContrast_UP
SQCutBadPix_020605_UP
SQDeBadPixel_Kernel_v031223
SQDeBadPixel_Kernel_v040212
SQEnhClr_UP
SQFastSaturation
SQGainAdj_030722
SQGbGrBalancer_030611
SQGbGrBalancer_040422
SQGetProcessedImage
SQInitialize2
SQInt_020605
SQInterpolateNrml
SQMakeInvGammaX
SQMakeInvGamma_905c
SQOffsetAdj_030924
SQRestoreDefaultParameter
SQSaveUsrParameter
SQShadow
SQSharpenMP_UP
SQSharpen_020508
SQShp_020521_UP
SQShp_020625
SQShp_020820
SQShp_031003
SQShp_040109
SQSmooth3C_UP
SQSmoothCbCr_v040218
SQSmooth_020604_UP
SQSmooth_030414
SQSmooth_030502
SQSmooth_030923
SQSmooth_Wavelet_040128
SQSmooth_Wavelet_040128_v2
SQUnInitialize


SQRS.DLL:

Fast_Bicubic_x2_MMX
SQBicubicResample_020925
SQResample_030218
fnDownSample_20021001


Compress.dll:

ADPCM_DeCode
ADPCM_EnCode
AnalyzeJPEG
BMP2JPG
JPEG_Decode
JpegRelease
Jpeginit
VLCADPCM_DeCode
VLCADPCM_EnCode
VLC_Decode
VLC_Encode

Camd905c.sys (905C, eh? I thought so...)

USBCAMD_AdapterReceivePacket
USBCAMD_ControlVendorCommand
USBCAMD_Debug_LogEntry
USBCAMD_DriverEntry
USBCAMD_GetRegistryKeyValue
USBCAMD_InitializeNewInterface
USBCAMD_SelectAlternateInterface

There's also a Capt905c.sys file that appears to not export or import any symbols. That doesn't seem right to me, althought I've been wrong before.