A photograph taken with a heavily modified video doorbell received an Honorable Mention in the Fine Art / Special Effects category at the 2026 Budapest International Foto Awards. Titled After Monet, it shows an orange fish drifting through an emerald-green pool.
Photographer Kamitaba used the doorbell's 1-megapixel sensor. Colors bleed beyond the edges of objects and outlines soften into a watercolor-like image. The effect came from the camera itself, not post-processing.
A camera made to check who's at the door has ended up in a fine-art photography competition. Its technical imperfections became the feature.
Afterglow is a homemade digital camera that locks its shutter after each photo until the user turns a winding knob. It simulates rolls of 24 exposures, with 12 and 36 also available, and requires rewinding at the end. A red-lit darkroom animation makes each photo appear to develop, while synthetic winding and shutter sounds complete the experience. The photos are actually saved to an SD card and can be transferred to a phone over Wi-Fi. Creator Nickson Kiprotich built it to bring back the ritual of film photography.
Digital photography spent decades removing the hassle of film. This camera uses electronics to lovingly put that hassle back.
Strange Inventions Lab made a book of every possible image at a tiny resolution, along with an Image Locator Camera that returns a page number instead of a photograph. The 512-page physical book contains all 512 possible 3×3 black-and-white pixel patterns. The camera reduces a scene to nine pixels and displays the page number for the matching pattern.
It neither saves the photograph nor searches the book. It calculates the page number directly from the pixels. The concept also works at higher resolutions and in color, but complete physical books for those modes have not been made.
Take a photo, receive a page number, and reach for a book. This camera makes a bookshelf part of the photography workflow.
Camera with Digital Film lets you physically pull the captured image out of the camera as a cartridge. A Raspberry Pi 3 A+ and 5 MP camera write each shot to a removable module containing a 1.54-inch four-color e-paper display.
The cartridge can then be displayed as a physical photograph. Because it is e-paper, the image remains visible without power and can later be overwritten. Modern digital hardware brings back one very specific analog pleasure: taking the picture out of the camera.
Digital cameras spent years eliminating film, and now the joy of pulling the picture out has come back around. A very elegant detour.
If a toothbrush is going to target the gaps between teeth precisely, it first needs to see exactly where the liquid should go. CameraJet tackles that with a roughly 100,000-pixel macro camera, machine-learning-assisted gap detection and a targeted liquid jet. Dyson introduced the device in September 2026, and a live view of the mouth can be displayed through the MyDyson app.
To keep the camera's view clear, the system also uses specially designed low-foaming toothpaste. Adding imaging, recognition and liquid control to brushing turns even the toothpaste into part of the system design.
At this point, even the toothpaste feels like part of the hardware stack. Oral care is starting to look like systems engineering.
A camera made to check who's at the door has ended up in a fine-art photography competition. Its technical imperfections became the feature.