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Do you have an old Game Boy laying around? We did. I bought an original game boy in 1988. Over the years, I lost all the games except for Tetris, which we played only occasionaly. We didn't think we'd find a new use for it until we bought a Game Boy camera this March. Small and cheap (about $50), it plugs into the game cartridge slot on the back of your Game Boy. The lens sits in a protuding sphere, which can be rotated to point different in directions. The complete assembly fits easily in a pocket. | 
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a self portriat, made from a mirror reflection, shows the author and the device 
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| For years we wanted a digital camera. We wanted to see images without waiting and paying a photo developer, and take pictures freely, knowing we could delete bad ones later. Unfortunately, the makers of digital cameras see only two markets: professionals with thousands of dollars to spend, and amateurs who take color snaps to show their relatives. Affordable digital cameras compete, at best, with cheap box cameras in image quality, and without interchangable lenses or the fine detail of silver film, which can be greatly enlarged, they offer little choice in composing images. For taking quality color photographs, they couldn't compete with the SLR camera we already own. But in the process of making another site, we dug our black and white Quickcam out of mothballs and attached it to our laptop. We were fascinated by its ghostly images, but it wasn't portable enough for general use. Seeing potential in a low-quality digital camera, we decided to take a chance and get a Gameboy camera. |
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| a sign in London. digital cameras let you take unlimited, instant pictures anywhere
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The Game Boy camera is different Amateur color photographs are inevitabily compared with the perfection of commercial color photography. Low resolution, black and white images from the Game Boy are not. The Game Boy camera doesn't have enough pixels to render smooth greys. Similar tones blend together, accentuating the contrast between light and dark. Between the blurring of fine details and the shallow depth of field, you have to get close to your subject to produce a recognisable image, introducing wide angle distortion. Unlike a 35mm camera, whose frame is rectangular, the Game Boy screen is nearly square, so you can't rotate the camera for vertical subjects. Rather, the longest line is diagonally across the screen, from corner to corner, so it's often effective to tilt the horizon to fit tall subjects into the frame. Wide angle distortion, the tilted horizon, increased contrast, and loss of detail give Game Boy camera images a distinctive style. |
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| grainy greys make moody portriats. vertical subjects fit well diagonally across the frame
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| The Game Boy camera is limited. And it isn't. The Game Boy camera is not a conventional camera, and you won't get much out of it if you use it like one. To use it effectively, try seeing the world the way it does. Your world is black and white. Contrast is accentuated. Detail is blurred. You can't see very far ahead, so you must get close to things to see them. Wide angle distortion creeps in. You tilt sideways to see as much of objects as you can and still be close to them. Familiar and boring objects often look surprising and different viewed througth the Game Boy camera's fuzzy, greyscale eye. Rows of seats on a train become seats on a spaceship in an old sci-fi movie. A glowing phone booth becomes a teleportation pod. Ordinary buildings become bombed out ruins. People's faces dissolve into grey dots, remaining eerily recognisable. |
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| in this grafitti similar greys have melted together, accentuating the black outlines
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| The world has enough bad color snapshots of Buckingham Palace We use the Game Boy as our main camera wherever we go. Since we can't take the usual snaps of famous buildings and monuments, we're forced to see things that most people overlook. Because the Game Boy stores only 30 pictures, we bring our Game Boy printer with us. Portable and powered by batteries, it prints images on a strip of paper the width of a cash register receipt. Although we were disappointed with the size of the images the first time we printed them out, we discovered we could blow them up wonderfully by scanning them. We print out images in short strips, and place the strips between pages in a hardcover book, which protects the pictures from weather and tearing and flattens them for scanning, giving us nearly unlimited capacity. |
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| in the dark on a train, a boy plays with a Game Boy
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| Putting the images to use At home, we scan the strips on a flatbed scanner in greyscale mode at 600 dpi. At this resolution the scanner sees every dot in the printout, and two features of the printer become evident--- first, because the printer uses thermal paper instead of an ink cartridge to form the images, contrast is increased, second, you can see the scan lines from the printer head. The scan lines blur away when the image size is reduced, but the increased contrast doesn't. You could fix this with a graphics editor, but we like the effect and plan our images to take advantage of it. You can add color or leave greyscale, and enlarge or reduce. The images compress well as .jpegs. We saved the images on this page at 30% quality without visible degredation. |
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| on black burners, white tofu sizzles in a black pan. the Gameboy printer increases contrast
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