During the Great American Eclipse, while most photographers worried about camera settings and solar filters, Redditor zhx decided to bust out a Game Boy Camera, which was introduced in 1998 and features a 128×128 pixel CMOS sensor.



Here’s the photo, captured from Portland, Oregon:

The solar eclipse actually takes up a very small portion of the frame, and the dark circle is a halo effect from the corona around the moon.

Here’s a photo of the camera kit zhx used:

The camera is so old that working with the resulting files isn’t exactly easy and straightforward. Here’s zhx’s explanation for how he got the photo off his Game Boy Camera:

I shot it on my backlit DMG [Game Boy], then I use the Interact Mega Memory card on my Pocket (the camera doesn’t fit in the DMG with the Mega Memory) and back the SAV file up to the Mega Memory. Then I plug my USB 64M cart into the MM and restore the file to that, which I can then plug into my computer and retrieve (I use EMS-Qart for that part). Then I can open the SAV file in either GBCamera Dump or this site which provides a pretty drag-and-drop front end for this task. I then typically enlarge the BMPs in Photoshop and export to PNG.

When it was released in 1998, the Game Boy Camera was actually the world’s smallest digital camera. Earlier this year, astrophotographer Alexander Pietrow became the first person to ever photograph the Moon and Jupiter using the device.

Image credits: Photographs by zhx and used with permission