David Bross Digital Bolex Rebuild Reaches Working Prototype – Kodak CCD, Raspberry Pi 5, Free Loaner Units Planned

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by Johnnie BehiriToday

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Late last year, we spoke with former cinematographer David Bross about his free DIGILOG iPhone app and his plan to revive the Digital Bolex D16 around its original Kodak CCD sensor. David has now written to me with an update: the camera exists as a fully working prototype, running on a Raspberry Pi 5 and powered by a V-mount battery. He also wants to build two extra units and hand them to directors and cinematographers for free. Let me share what he told me.

For those of you who missed the earlier chapters, the Digital Bolex D16 was a 2K Super 16 cinema camera built around a Kodak KAI-05040 interline CCD, created by Joe Rubinstein and his team and discontinued in 2016. We covered that camera from its first shipping announcement all the way to its final firmware update, and I still remember how sad we all were when production stopped.

David, who has since moved from film sets into woodworking, furniture design, and app development, told us last December that he had acquired four of the original Kodak CCD sensors and was rebuilding the camera with contemporary components. You can read that story in our DIGILOG article, and if you have an hour to spare, his conversation with me on Focus Check episode 103 is well worth a listen.

From lab bench to the real world

According to David, he set the DIGILOG app aside for a few months this year (the current version is 1.3) to concentrate on the Bolex, and before the summer he finished the first fully functional prototype. The build is deliberately simple, as he describes it on his project page: a Raspberry Pi 5 at the core, firmware written in Python for now, a touchscreen for display and menu navigation, recording to an SSD, and V-mount battery power. In his words, what a joy to finally step out of the lab and face the real world.

The prototype housing is a wooden box, and David is very open about the fact that it is much bigger than it needs to be. The solder joints are tiny, and he had to keep opening and closing the case to check one thing or another, so he built himself room to get his hands inside. The final design, he says, will be more compact and more ergonomic, made from a combination of wood and aluminum. Knowing his background as a furniture maker, I am very curious to see what that camera body ends up looking like.

The color science is still the heart of it

If you listened to the podcast, you will remember that the sensor was never really the point for David. What he is after is a cinema color science of his own, built from the inside. He plans to shoot the CCD side by side with real Kodak 500T and 250D negative stock and derive a color matrix from those tests, so the digital camera learns to render like the film sitting next to it. That step has not happened yet. He was waiting to buy another film camera to get the comparison shots done, and an arrangement with the Bordeaux film school fell through simply because their schedules never lined up. He would now rather do it at home, on his own time.

Once that matrix exists, David says he can properly dig into the camera’s color science, and the same work feeds directly into version 2 of DIGILOG. Interestingly, he sees the pause on the app as a good thing. Stepping back gave him time to collect constructive feedback from users, and in his opinion it is not a bad idea to wait a little before rolling out major updates. Having watched more than a few products ship updates too early, I tend to agree with him.

Before getting carried away, I should mention the footage. David sent me a private link to the very first clips he shot with the prototype over the summer, with the honest caveat that the color matrix was not calibrated for the sensor yet and everything is at a very early stage. He asked us to be forgiving, and I think that is fair: this is a camera that did not exist a year ago, filmed by the person who soldered it together. Judge the rendering once the matrix is in place, which is exactly what this whole project is about.

Component prices have tripled

Here is the part of the update that made me wince. David reports that component prices have roughly tripled since the project began. His example is the Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of RAM, which went from €124 (around $145) per unit to almost €347 (around $405). We have been writing about the memory shortage and its effect on gear prices for a while now, and it is a sobering reminder that the same supply squeeze hitting the big manufacturers lands even harder on a one-person project with no purchasing power at all.

It is not stopping him, though. David wants to build at least three units. One will be his own, and the other two will be made available for free to directors and cinematographers who would like to work with them. In other words, he is looking for the first volunteers to test the loaner cameras, and that is the main reason he got in touch with us again: to re-engage the community around this project and find those people.

Availability and how to get involved

There is no price, no store, and no shipping date, because this is not a product. David is building three cameras by hand, and the two loaner units will go to filmmakers who want to shoot with them, at no cost. If that sounds like you, the best place to follow progress is his YouTube channel, where he plans to post the first real results as they come, and his project page on davidbross.fr explains the thinking behind the rebuild in his own words. David also credits Csaba Nagy‘s open work on the CinePi as the thing that pushed him to start, and Joe Rubinstein for helping along the way, which I think says a lot about the spirit of the whole undertaking.

A big thank you to David for keeping us in the loop, and for the candor about what works, what does not, and what it all costs.

Guys, would you put a hand-built CCD camera with an unfinished color science on a real shoot, and what would you want to point it at? Please share your thoughts with us in the comment section below.