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3D Printed Panoramic Back for 4x5 cameras
  • eatstoomuchjameatstoomuchjam

    I've had an idea kicking around in my mind for a while now to 3D print a sliding back for medium/large format cameras, but my old 3D printer had major problems with multi-hour prints and would never quite get them right. Finally, I acquired a newer printer which seems to be doing a better job (so far) so I built this up in blender during my evenings in the last week.

    There will probably be a few iterations of this (including trying to print the slider on HIPS to bypass ABS warping problems which are keeping it from being flat), but overall I'm pretty happy with it. I brought it out for some tests this afternoon and because of a dumb mistake I made, I only had time to shoot one series, but I'm excited to shoot some more now!

    Sliding back

    Sliding back on camera

    Sliding back on camera

    Test image

    100% crop from test image

  • 2 Replies sorted by
  • Adam_MercierAdam_Mercier

    Very interesting! I'm quite interested to design and print a custom back for instax wide film :)

  • eatstoomuchjameatstoomuchjam

    Cool idea! If Instax Wide works like a lot of instant films, it'd need some sort of mechanism to advance the exposed film through rollers to activate processing. I'm not sure my Blender skills are up to building out the internal mechanism.

    A few modders (in particular, option8) have been modding the Lomo Belair backs to fit on 4x5. It looks like they're trimming off the front and top and grafting on a graflok and darkslide mechanism. That seems pretty reasonable - the Belair is only $89 which seems pretty reasonable to avoid the work to reverse engineer the Instax mechanism - unless you plan to start selling them for $350-400 each like option8 is doing. :)

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