An Old-School Film Trick Finally Brings Color to the Game Boy Camera

The Game Boy Camera was one of the first in truth crummy digital camera , but the trade - off was that it could only snap grainy , 128×112 - pixel black and white exposure . Despite its abysmal ikon quality , there are still a few lensman who love the Game Boy Camera ’s lo - fi artistic , includingMatt Graywhodiscovered an honest-to-goodness - school photography trickthat finally lets the peripheral produce colour images .

Somewhere between 1905 and 1915 , Russian chemist and lensman Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin - Gorskycreated one of the first coloring material photographs with Alim Khan , the Emir of Bukhara , as his subject . But instead of reinvent the science of film and photography to make the image , he simply conform exist technique , using coloured filters to shoot three dim and blank glass disconfirming figure that were after combined in the lab tocreate a full - color photograph .

That access became one of the most common ways to create color photographs , and even colouration motion picture . Hollywood ’s famed Technicolor process even used a alike proficiency , but relied on prisms to split the lightness coming into a camera which seize multiple shameful and white picture exposures that were later used to create full - colouring material print , mighty up until films like The Godfather Part II in the mid-’70s .

So instead of hack the electronics inside the Game Boy Camera , or trying to upgrade its CMOS sensing element , Matt Gray plainly bought three dark filters on Amazon and then held them up in front of the camera ’s electron lens to take three freestanding black and white photos . The most complicated part of the process seemed to bring forth the photos from the Game Boy Camera onto a computerso that Gray was able-bodied to combine the three snaps in Photoshop to create the colorful results .

For optimal image , the Game Boy Camera needs to be point at a very colourful scenery to start with . And because it ingest a few seconds to snap each effigy due to the Game Boy ’s modified processing great power , you ’ll want to avoid too much apparent movement in a scene . If you ’re trying to shoot people , they ’ll have to stand very , very still to ascertain the three black - and - whitened source images line up dead in the remainder . It ’s a hassle , there ’s no incertitude about that , but if you turn up fascinated with your Game Boy Camera , this seems like a fun experiment to try yourself .

[ YouTubeviaHackaday ]

Argentina’s President Javier Milei (left) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., holding a chainsaw in a photo posted to Kennedy’s X account on May 27. 2025.