As someone who's been doing mechanical product engineering for 30+ years, doing this as a first project is way more than jumping off the deep end. Impressive.
The Panasonic GX series of cameras was very similar to what we see here, and prices for them remain elevated years past their discontinuation. I'm a little surprised they haven't introduced a new model in that lineup.
The Fuji X-E5 also seems similar to this, though obviously with a different lens mount.
GM-5 is probably the greatest pocket-size mirrorless, and maybe the last. The GX-85 is also great, but it does have a larger grip and more of a shoulder at the top.
The G-100D is also quite small, but the faux pentaprism at the top makes it just a bit too big to justify being MFT.
I have to say I'm a bit unimpressed with the efforts of the MFT consumer system camera manufacturers. Panasonic creates excellent cameras, they're so big it lessens the appeal of the smaller mount. OM makes cameras of the right size, but it's releasing new models really really slowly, with mediocre sensors. The OM-5 mark II is a lame rehash. Only the OM-3 is somewhat exciting, but it sacrifices too much in terms of ergonomics to achieve an aesthetic I don't care about.
On the other hand there's no other class of camera that really works on vacation/travel and is meaningfully better than a smartphone. Oh, well.
The volume for physical cameras is low and shrinking. The companies can't justify putting nearly the same investment as smartphone companies selling 100x the units can.
The OM-3 is fine ergonomically, for me at least. The thumb pad on the back is very comfortable and balances the body very well. I held off buying one for a while because of ergonomic concerns but in practice it’s been great.
>On the other hand there's no other class of camera that really works on vacation/travel and is meaningfully better than a smartphone.
My a6500 is serving me well, though I guess it depends what you mean by "meaningfully better than a smartphone". I do end up with a lot more photos that I like when I go on vacation with a camera than with just a smartphone
Edit: also applies to commuting, but I'm always a bit uneasy about having my camera with me when comutting.
Olympus is one of the few camera (I literally have hundreds as this is my side hobby) I love to use. Until every time I want to change anything. As a guy who can do 8x10, gfx, 907x, z9 etc I still find the menu system totally confusing.
I'm very happy with my thoroughly behind-the-curve E-M10, and I'm secretly glad the newer ones aren't all that great because I don't have to spend money on upgrading.
> Only the OM-3 is somewhat exciting, but it sacrifices too much in terms of ergonomics to achieve an aesthetic I don't care about.
I was very disappointed with the om3. I love the aesthetic, but I feel it's half-assed. The faux-pentaprism bump is the specific point I hate. If it had the body of a pen-f, I would have been all over it. As it is, it's just a prettier om-1 with worse ergonomics.
I should note that I already have a pen-f, and don't have any issue with its ergonomics (I used it yesterday on -5ºC with big gloves, it was fine). Since I don't lug around foot-long lenses, the lack of grip isn't a problem.
I understand the urge to say this to potential blog readers. But you're not actually selling us anything. Who cares if you're qualified or not? You built it and you're telling us what you learned.
This is amazing. It's such a shame that Olympus and Panasonic have largely abandoned the small camera market within the M43 system. I really wish another manufacturer would step up and build something similar to the GX85, which is still one of my favorite walkaround cameras.
FWIW, Olympus spun-off/sold their consumer camera division. It's now operating as OM System (1) and has released a few new cameras over the past few years. As the article mentioned, the latest is the OM-3, which is sort of similar form factor, but not exactly compact. They also have the smaller Pen EP-7, but it's not available in the US (though they're readily available on Ebay or via KEH etc). I bought an EP-7 for an earlier Xmas gift to myself, but haven't had much change to use it (previously had an EP-5 and E-M5ii).
I just bought a GX9 5 years after selling my whole system cause I missed the form factor so much. M43 really is the best compromise between size and image quality imo, with the caveat that I'm not a professional. No other mount lets me casually EDC an 80-300 equivalent lens.
There's Esquisse (https://esquisse.camera/) trying to step up, but it's still in the very early stages.
This is awesome! Great work. The "do first, ask questions later" mindset is inspiring as it's so easy (for me at least) to get stuck forever in a preparation / ideas phase.
I would also love to see some photos taken with it.
Unless something went terribly wrong, they'll look just like photos taken with a Panasonic G9 II. Samples from that camera are readily available online.
This post, where someone from one field decides to do something they love but in another field, reminds me of the below:
At my kids' elementary school there is a yearly "Dad's Night" show where the dads get up and do skits, dance, sing and/or make funny videos.
You get to see dads who sell insurance or are lawyers do dance numbers that look professionally choreographed or make music videos that look like they could have been on MTV.
It's a reminder that "The Sort" pulls people very strongly into certain fields but there is always that question, from the movie Up In The Air and asked by George Clooney, "How much did they pay you to give up your dream?" [0]
Part of me is VERY excited to see AI/LLMs help facilitate this for the people who always thought "I have always wanted to write a piece of software but didn't know how and now I can!"
> the lens should be as centered as possible. I wanted to avoid that horrendous look of cameras with the lens as close to the left edge as possible (Sony a6000, I’m looking at you here).
The only thing really wrong about the Sony a6000 is the lack of weatherproofing. With even a 55-210 kit lens and maybe a good filter, you can still get amazing quality from far away - such as being able to pick apart finer architectural details of a monument that’s about 5-6mi away.
Practically and ergonomically I prefer a centered lens. Your hand has to reach less far to reach the focus ring and aperture control. Most slr cameras have buttons on both sides of the lens, so developing muscle memory is easier when those actions are split between each hand. Rotation of the camera is also much more natural. It also centers the lens' pov between your eyes, matching their parallax, which is really important for composing the photograph outside of the viewfinder.
When I was shopping, I was comparing the Sony Alphas with the Fujifilm XT line.
And in reviews, complaints were made that the lens (and view finder) being centered in the XT means you squish your nose against the screen in the back.
But... I just liked the look and dials of the XT-5 so much more than the barebones boxy look of the α6700.
(Sony has meaningfully better autofocus too, I'll be sad, but I wanted the nice looking body...)
And yes my nose squishes against that back screen.
My only camera is a Sony a6000 and I bought it partially because I thought it looked great. If it causes some issue I wouldn't even know it because I've never tried something else.
Amazing work, and so inspiring! The size difference compared to the G9ii made it all worth it!
Lately I've been converting a few old 5k iMac's to work as external displays, and I had a thought about making my own housing for the display instead of using the iMac chassis. This gives me some motivation to look into it further!
I’ve been thinking about putting an MFT mount on my RX100 to use it with more interesting lenses (I have it for the high frame rate capability) but concluded it to be way too much effort and risk.
And then along comes a person with enough determination to build an entire custom case! Truly impressive.
I saw footage someone captured when they modified their Canon 1D to use a PL mount. They then mounted a 17mm, iirc, that in a slow shutter could capture as many photons as my shitty 20mm EF mount could do in a 5s long exposure in bulb mode. The front piece of glass on that 17mm was ginormous. I really wish I could remember the guy's name to find a link. He mounted that camera to the front of a fishing boat down the canyon river pushed by the current navigating in the dark with night vision goggles. The resulting timelapse was glorious.
There was something specific to the body of the 1D that allowed for the proper flange depth of PL lenses that the other Canon bodies did not work for this mod.
Very impressive build! It's amazing what one can do thanks to CNC and FLPCB manufacturing services readily available to any motivated hacker.
One tip for the author who noticed the camera being warm: measure its power consumption, and compare to an unmodified G9ii. Especially because you noticed it drains the battery relatively quickly(!) This is a glaring "connect the dots" situation to me. The root cause might be something very stupid. For example when you removed the microphone jack, the camera thought a microphone was connected, so it activated a microphone nenu. But given the extensive number of mods you made, it's possible you are making the firmware think some accessory is connected—could be anything: (light) flash, external screen, USB gadget, JTAG reader, SD card, etc. So it's taking a code path to initialize the device, but it fails because the device is not present, and it retries repeatedly, thus entering a retry loop that's causing excessive CPU usage... That wouldn't surprise me. You are running a G9ii that's unique therefore a rare software code path like this would not happen on a standard G9ii and would never have been fixed by the developers.
Edit: I see the author measured power here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lumix/comments/1oif3jp/how_much_doe... and to my eyes, these seem really high numbers. For example in video playback mode he measures 340mA, so 2.45W (battery is 7.2V nominal). The standard G9ii battery is 16Wh that means it would last only 6.5 hours playing back video. Compare this to a Pixel 9 phone: 18.3Wh battery and can playback video for 15 hours (I believe these are benchmark numbers reported playing back 4k H264 video, probably in a similar-ish format to the G9ii in terms of bitrate, etc). Plus the phone is at a disadvantage as it has a bigger, more power-hungry display. So it seems to me his G9ii consumes twice as much power as it should, if not more... If anything a pro camera should be more optimized than a general-purpose consumer device when playing video!
Agreed, this is some proper nice tinkering writeup that we get far too rarely now.
Lovely project! I'm a software guy who in recent years does lots of CAD for hobby projects (mainly robotics) and orders custom machined parts (lots of sheet metal construction, occasionally milled parts) along with 3D printing.
I find parametric modelling very zen. Stacking operations is very Lego-like, like stringing up pure functions. Plus I can listen to podcasts while I model, but not while I write code - it engages the brain differently.
Now that LLMs are sapping some of the joy out of programming (I use the tools, they're productive, achieving goals and delivering user value is still satisfying, etc. - but the act of writing code is just more enjoyable than prompting, so it's a tad dispiriting that it's getting harder to jusitify) I also find that I get a lot of satisfaction from doing something with my hands. In some ways it's a safer space for technical creativity.
The camera they want is also the camera I want. I say this as someone who still regularly shoots with an Olympus Pen-F and also has a Fuji X100VI, and primarily shoots a Nikon Z8 but wishes there was a more compact entry into FF. I actually really like the m4/3/MFT format, especially for travel photography, but it's a struggle because the best lenses are Pana/Leica and the best bodies are OM/Oly, and neither has done much to really develop the technology in the last 10 years. MFT feels dead, but even as a dead format, nothing compares to the size/weight flexibility it gives you.
>>> …them myself with a manual tapping tool. Well, that didn’t go well, it was hard to keep the tool straight, the threads were loose, and broke few taps rendering the holes useless.
The haters will hate, but tap guides are great (e.g. https://biggatortools.com/v-tapguide-faqs, but even a block of hard wood with a clearance hole drilled in it works fine).
Unless you're tapping something super tough (306?), Amazon taps are fine for hand tapping. Go in straight, use a good lubricant.
It's a nice build, but there is a baffling discordance between putting all this time and money into making a CNC body and ripping the ports off a $1900 camera's motherboard with pliers when the soldering iron didn't do the job rather than waiting until you could get a hot air rig, which could easily have destroyed the motherboard by peeling a trace or cracking layers. I guess at a certain point you just have too much money to behave rationally.
I do not know if the author/creator is a user here on HN. But if you are, then absolutely amazing work. I love everything about it! You really did create a much more aesthetically pleasing camera and must have learned a ton along the way. I applaud your courage and/or naïveté to even undertake a project like this for no other reason than because you want it to exist.
This kind of thing works better with GPL. General use falls under GPL. If that doesn’t suit your commercial use, contact the copyright holder for another license.
As it stands, I can use the MIT licensed project anyway I like, including handing it to a commercial entity for their use.
This is an amazing project and level of effort, and I empathize deeply with this photographers desire for a clean, simple, beautiful camera.
I so deeply want a modern EVF camera, doesn’t even have to be a rangefinder, with a mechanically wound shutter so the film advance lever has a reason to exist.
incredible project but unless I'm misunderstanding what he is comparing it to, this is only a few hundred dollars/euros less than a used leica m digital body per a quick ebay search.
Thanks! I'm comparing with the latest Ms, I'm not gonna buy old tech. I want also autofocus which this cameras don't have. It might be fun to manual focus with their lenses (also expensive) but I don't see myself doing this all the time.
A lot of the Leica-branded lenses have an aperture ring that doesn't work on Olympus bodies. Besides that, both brands have proprietary lens + body stabilization that only work if the lenses and bodies match.
This is batshit insane, and I fully fully endorse this person's madness to do such things. This is what the internet is _for_
Going straight into making a camera is very much a bold move.
my next comment isn't for the author, as they have strong enough opinions on cameras to do this. But for everyone else, I have greatly enjoyed fujifilms line of cameras.
I borrowed a gfx100s from work, and my word is a wonderful machine. (it should be for the price) for more normal budgets, the x series is great. Unlike a canon what you see is what you get, and the autofocus works on objects rather than the closest fucking thing it sees.
Something is terribly wrong with the patent system if anything about sticking the innards of a commercially-produced camera into a different-shaped metal case is patentable.
s1mon|1 month ago
buildbot|1 month ago
I saw the level of detail in the model and am shocked. If this is truly their first experience with CAD/CAM they are a natural.
For example - here’s my home built camera. It’s massively more simplistic: https://blog.maxg.io/phase-one-swc/
alansaber|1 month ago
Zak|1 month ago
The Fuji X-E5 also seems similar to this, though obviously with a different lens mount.
yabones|1 month ago
The G-100D is also quite small, but the faux pentaprism at the top makes it just a bit too big to justify being MFT.
https://petapixel.com/2025/06/28/the-panasonic-lumix-gm-5-is...
criddell|1 month ago
It doesn't seem like it would take a lot to keep this line going. Bump the sensor, change the USB cable, add GPS, etc... but keep the form factor.
I guess the market just isn't big enough.
Glyptodon|1 month ago
davidjytang|1 month ago
tormeh|1 month ago
On the other hand there's no other class of camera that really works on vacation/travel and is meaningfully better than a smartphone. Oh, well.
Glyptodon|1 month ago
SchemaLoad|1 month ago
james_in_the_uk|1 month ago
Zababa|1 month ago
My a6500 is serving me well, though I guess it depends what you mean by "meaningfully better than a smartphone". I do end up with a lot more photos that I like when I go on vacation with a camera than with just a smartphone
Edit: also applies to commuting, but I'm always a bit uneasy about having my camera with me when comutting.
ngcc_hk|1 month ago
It is not the hardware, it is the software …
Retr0id|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
vladvasiliu|1 month ago
I was very disappointed with the om3. I love the aesthetic, but I feel it's half-assed. The faux-pentaprism bump is the specific point I hate. If it had the body of a pen-f, I would have been all over it. As it is, it's just a prettier om-1 with worse ergonomics.
I should note that I already have a pen-f, and don't have any issue with its ergonomics (I used it yesterday on -5ºC with big gloves, it was fine). Since I don't lug around foot-long lenses, the lack of grip isn't a problem.
DoctorOW|1 month ago
I understand the urge to say this to potential blog readers. But you're not actually selling us anything. Who cares if you're qualified or not? You built it and you're telling us what you learned.
flerchin|1 month ago
_0xdd|1 month ago
alistairSH|1 month ago
1 - https://explore.omsystem.com/us/en/
goochwart|1 month ago
There's Esquisse (https://esquisse.camera/) trying to step up, but it's still in the very early stages.
zokier|1 month ago
ayoubd|1 month ago
I would also love to see some photos taken with it.
Topgamer7|1 month ago
https://www.instagram.com/cristi.baluta
Zak|1 month ago
alexpotato|1 month ago
At my kids' elementary school there is a yearly "Dad's Night" show where the dads get up and do skits, dance, sing and/or make funny videos.
You get to see dads who sell insurance or are lawyers do dance numbers that look professionally choreographed or make music videos that look like they could have been on MTV.
It's a reminder that "The Sort" pulls people very strongly into certain fields but there is always that question, from the movie Up In The Air and asked by George Clooney, "How much did they pay you to give up your dream?" [0]
Part of me is VERY excited to see AI/LLMs help facilitate this for the people who always thought "I have always wanted to write a piece of software but didn't know how and now I can!"
0 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkX-TPaodoM
amelius|1 month ago
Funny, the things some people obsess about :)
wibbily|1 month ago
cmxch|1 month ago
blindstitch|1 month ago
neogodless|1 month ago
And in reviews, complaints were made that the lens (and view finder) being centered in the XT means you squish your nose against the screen in the back.
But... I just liked the look and dials of the XT-5 so much more than the barebones boxy look of the α6700.
(Sony has meaningfully better autofocus too, I'll be sad, but I wanted the nice looking body...)
And yes my nose squishes against that back screen.
izzydata|1 month ago
ge96|1 month ago
petre|1 month ago
ebbi|1 month ago
Lately I've been converting a few old 5k iMac's to work as external displays, and I had a thought about making my own housing for the display instead of using the iMac chassis. This gives me some motivation to look into it further!
Yaggo|1 month ago
solarkraft|1 month ago
I’ve been thinking about putting an MFT mount on my RX100 to use it with more interesting lenses (I have it for the high frame rate capability) but concluded it to be way too much effort and risk.
And then along comes a person with enough determination to build an entire custom case! Truly impressive.
dylan604|1 month ago
There was something specific to the body of the 1D that allowed for the proper flange depth of PL lenses that the other Canon bodies did not work for this mod.
mrb|1 month ago
One tip for the author who noticed the camera being warm: measure its power consumption, and compare to an unmodified G9ii. Especially because you noticed it drains the battery relatively quickly(!) This is a glaring "connect the dots" situation to me. The root cause might be something very stupid. For example when you removed the microphone jack, the camera thought a microphone was connected, so it activated a microphone nenu. But given the extensive number of mods you made, it's possible you are making the firmware think some accessory is connected—could be anything: (light) flash, external screen, USB gadget, JTAG reader, SD card, etc. So it's taking a code path to initialize the device, but it fails because the device is not present, and it retries repeatedly, thus entering a retry loop that's causing excessive CPU usage... That wouldn't surprise me. You are running a G9ii that's unique therefore a rare software code path like this would not happen on a standard G9ii and would never have been fixed by the developers.
Edit: I see the author measured power here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Lumix/comments/1oif3jp/how_much_doe... and to my eyes, these seem really high numbers. For example in video playback mode he measures 340mA, so 2.45W (battery is 7.2V nominal). The standard G9ii battery is 16Wh that means it would last only 6.5 hours playing back video. Compare this to a Pixel 9 phone: 18.3Wh battery and can playback video for 15 hours (I believe these are benchmark numbers reported playing back 4k H264 video, probably in a similar-ish format to the G9ii in terms of bitrate, etc). Plus the phone is at a disadvantage as it has a bigger, more power-hungry display. So it seems to me his G9ii consumes twice as much power as it should, if not more... If anything a pro camera should be more optimized than a general-purpose consumer device when playing video!
tshanmu|1 month ago
The article could have been better with sharing some photos taken with the new camera.
sho_hn|1 month ago
Lovely project! I'm a software guy who in recent years does lots of CAD for hobby projects (mainly robotics) and orders custom machined parts (lots of sheet metal construction, occasionally milled parts) along with 3D printing.
I find parametric modelling very zen. Stacking operations is very Lego-like, like stringing up pure functions. Plus I can listen to podcasts while I model, but not while I write code - it engages the brain differently.
Now that LLMs are sapping some of the joy out of programming (I use the tools, they're productive, achieving goals and delivering user value is still satisfying, etc. - but the act of writing code is just more enjoyable than prompting, so it's a tad dispiriting that it's getting harder to jusitify) I also find that I get a lot of satisfaction from doing something with my hands. In some ways it's a safer space for technical creativity.
Can highly recommend hobbies like this.
satvikpendem|1 month ago
srean|1 month ago
I recently got curious about whether nature solves the Bayer pattern problem and if so, how.
Are there any 3 element crystalline compounds with the formula A_2BC with roughly same sized atoms for A, B and C ?
If they have a 2D tiling that would nature's Bayer pattern.
_aavaa_|1 month ago
dsego|1 month ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujifilm_X-Trans_sensor
flakiness|1 month ago
Kon5ole|1 month ago
nancyminusone|1 month ago
tristor|1 month ago
analog31|1 month ago
Cheap taps from Amazon?
mjb|1 month ago
Unless you're tapping something super tough (306?), Amazon taps are fine for hand tapping. Go in straight, use a good lubricant.
theodric|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
q-base|1 month ago
abetusk|1 month ago
> This project is open-source under the MIT License. Feel free to modify and use — but no commercial use without permission.
[0] https://github.com/cristibaluta/Leica-G9ii?tab=readme-ov-fil...
jagged-chisel|1 month ago
This kind of thing works better with GPL. General use falls under GPL. If that doesn’t suit your commercial use, contact the copyright holder for another license.
As it stands, I can use the MIT licensed project anyway I like, including handing it to a commercial entity for their use.
cristi_baluta|1 month ago
buildbot|1 month ago
I so deeply want a modern EVF camera, doesn’t even have to be a rangefinder, with a mechanically wound shutter so the film advance lever has a reason to exist.
I’m aware of the Epson R1 but 6MP is too low.
alistairSH|1 month ago
https://shopusa.fujifilm-x.com/x-half-x-half/
m463|1 month ago
lol. Sounds like every passion project, ever.
I have friends who have worked on their car project, their bathroom project, their workshop project, their custom pc build, even the home they built.
I wonder if anyone has ever built something and said... "It is perfect, I am satisfied!"
Maybe just from the outside. Like the casio f91w, the ak47, the porsche 959 or the hersheys bar.
Suppafly|1 month ago
NooneAtAll3|1 month ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSvjJGbFCws
erghjunk|1 month ago
cristi_baluta|1 month ago
criddell|1 month ago
unknown|1 month ago
[deleted]
the_arun|1 month ago
cromulent|1 month ago
twic|1 month ago
Are they?
goochwart|1 month ago
rdlw|1 month ago
KaiserPro|1 month ago
Going straight into making a camera is very much a bold move.
my next comment isn't for the author, as they have strong enough opinions on cameras to do this. But for everyone else, I have greatly enjoyed fujifilms line of cameras.
I borrowed a gfx100s from work, and my word is a wonderful machine. (it should be for the price) for more normal budgets, the x series is great. Unlike a canon what you see is what you get, and the autofocus works on objects rather than the closest fucking thing it sees.
relaxing|1 month ago
ted_dunning|1 month ago
poppafuze|1 month ago
mlsu|1 month ago
[deleted]
XCSme|1 month ago
renewiltord|1 month ago
[deleted]
SilentM68|1 month ago
If there is anything that can be patented, I'd make sure to patent it.
Zak|1 month ago
ionelaipatioaei|1 month ago