In article , John A.
wrote:

But I can see DIY fabrication tech eventually progressing to the point
where a talented hobbyist could someday make such a device so they
could make use of antique pre-digital SLRs. Not anytime that soon, of
course.

it's not possible for a hobbyist to do.

Not now, no. But everything hobbyists can do now was at one time not
possible for hobbyists. The 3D printing thing is just the tip of the
iceberg.

a hobbyist still needs to solve the shutter collision problem and will
likely need to mill out the film gate unless they want a really small
crop factor.

if they do mill out the film gate, they'll need to do it without any
shavings falling into the internals of the shutter mechanism, or they
will have to disassemble the camera to do the milling instead.

Not possible != never will be possible. Confusing the two has been a
much too common error throughout history.

then call it for all intents not possible nor cost effective for
someone who is just a hobbyist.

In any case, the problems with the whole drop-in film-compatible
digital sensor idea might be solved by taking an entirely different
approach, though admittedly something that would be more (perhaps far
more) dependent on future tech advances.

Imagine instead of a digital sensor/reader/memory in a canister + film
form factor, going with erasable & reusable film and an external
reader/eraser. You would load it into the camera just like regular
film, shoot the roll or as much of it as you want, then rewind it and
pop it into the external reader/eraser. The r/e would scan the film,
digitizing the recorded image then erasing the film and returning it
to it's ready-to-load-and-shoot state again.

actually, that's been done with traditional film.

there was a company who made a machine that was basically a film
processing system, much like the ones that exist today, but instead of
producing a negative, it scanned it directly and gave you a cd.

i don't remember its name and searching is giving me way too many false
hits on scanning services, movie conversions, etc.

one of its drawbacks was you did not get the negatives. the film was
destroyed in the processing/scanning. that is probably one reason why
it failed.

this was about 10-15 years ago.

We have negative/slide scanners and such already. Best-practice for
transferring digital photos from a camera to a computer is already to
move the recording medium (memory card) to an external reader rather
than plugging the camera into the comp, so that's not so different.
The one big thing that would need to be developed is the
eraseable/reuseable film.

other than that...

considering that r&d on film has mostly dried up because digital has
long surpassed it, i doubt this will ever come to pass.

the two links you gave are interesting, but there's nothing that
indicates it will produce images comparable to the best films, which
aren't as good as digital anyway.

in other words, what's the point?