Digital Sensor Frog Kissing

Twenty years or so ago, when it was released, the lovely large digital sensor above would have cost around 24 thousand dollars. Now you can pick them up for much, much, less than this. I got one off ebay with the aim of converting one of my film cameras to digital. You have to plug the sensor into your computer using a FireWire cable and the result is not particularly portable, but you do get digital results (albeit low resolution by today’s standards). Back in the day magazine and product photographers used them in their studios to replace film. The aim was to get the fast turnaround of digital and the quality of their familiar large format cameras.

I decided it might be fun to have a go with one, and I’m now in the “kissing frogs” phase of the acquisition. Just like you don’t always get a prince (or princess) when you kiss a frog, you don’t always get what you want when you buy from ebay. Particularly with twenty year old digital film backs using an obsolete connection technology. The trick is to plan for this, treat the whole thing as a journey, and make sure that the seller accepts returns.

The film back above, with its lovely clean sensor and immaculate condition, doesn’t actually work when I plug it in. It’s behaving in a manner best described as “broken”. The documentation and the super-helpful folks at Phase One support lead me to suspect that the computer inside the film back has forgotten its software - a problem that can happen with old devices. The good news is that the supplier will accept returns, and it might even be possible to restore the firmware by sending the device back to Finland for a service (but I don’t know the price yet). I’ve learned a lot about the digital back connection process, FireWire and how the device is used, and I now know one way they can fail. I might need to obtain another frog to kiss, but in the meantime I’m having fun, which is the important thing in all this.