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This designer took photos of the Moon by attaching a telephoto lens to his Game Boy Camera

This designer took photos of the Moon by attaching a telephoto lens to his Game Boy Camera

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Telephoto lens attached to Game Boy Camera
Image: Bastiaan Ekeler

Many people have figured out ways to hack and adapt Nintendo’s Game Boy, but designer Bastiaan Ekeler’s Canon lens adapter is visually one of the most bizarre yet. Ekeler’s device might not be practical, but if you ever wanted to know what the Moon looks like captured via Game Boy Camera, here it is.

Nintendo’s Game Boy Camera is an accessory that was manufactured from 1998 to 2002. Compatible with all Game Boy platforms, it snapped in the cartridge slot and took black and white photos at a resolution of 128 x 112. As pointed out by Engadget, Ekeler isn’t the first to make mods to the camera, but his version does stand alone in sheer proportion ridiculousness.

The adapter was first drawn in Rhino 3D, then manufactured with a Monoprice Select Mini v2 3D printer. It then connects to the Game Boy Camera, placed within a Game Boy. His adapter should work with any number of Canon lenses, but for this particular experiment, Ekeler was interested in pushing boundaries and creating, as he says, an “abomination.”

To that end, he attached a 70-200mm telephoto lens mounted on a 1.4x teleconverter for a max equivalent focal distance of about 3,000mm. Taking the camera out to shoot wildlife, he was able to not only capture close-ups of seagulls, ships at sea, and yes, even the Moon. Then, the images were transferred off and converted from HEX to PNG.

Ekeler says he was not expecting the quality achieved in the images, and he might make further refinements to the 3D model and post it on Thingiverse for others to print themselves. “The bird shots actually show some surprisingly creamy bokeh,” he says in his original post. “For a 2-bit, 14 kilopixel image, there might be some portrait session in this camera’s future.”

Photos taken with Game Boy Camera
Image: Bastiaan Ekeler