---
title: "This 3D-Printed Camera Works. Its Creator Is Scrapping It Anyway"
locale: "en"
url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/printed-camera-shutter-scrapped-en"
markdown_url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/printed-camera-shutter-scrapped-en.md"
category: "creative"
tags: ["3D printing", "camera", "photography", "mechanism", "shutter"]
published_at: "2026-08-23T17:16:00.000Z"
author: "Camille Morel"
translation: "https://irz.fr/fr/articles/printed-camera-shutter-scrapped-fr.md"
---

# This 3D-Printed Camera Works. Its Creator Is Scrapping It Anyway

After three years of prototypes, Camera Things finally built a 3D-printed variable-speed shutter. Then he abandoned the mechanism: it works, but its geometry scales badly from half-frame to full 35 mm.

The camera takes photographs at several shutter settings, and although the rangefinder still misses the precision it needs, the viewfinder frames well enough to use. Over the last three years, the project has moved from a pinhole cap to a selectable focal-plane shutter, so calling this version finished would be perfectly reasonable.

Its creator says he is going to **scrap the whole thing and start again**.[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xghEQB88wc)

The decision is more useful than a victory lap. Camera Things succeeded in building a 3D-printed focal-plane shutter controlled by an adjustable slit, only to discover that the geometry behind that feature prevents the camera from scaling cleanly.

The prototype works in half-frame, whereas expanding the same mechanism to a full 35 mm image would make the body impractically wide. In other words, three years of work produced a good answer for one format and a poor architecture for the next.[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xghEQB88wc)[2](https://hackaday.com/2026/08/22/the-shutter-makes-this-3d-printed-camera-special/)

## The hard part

Printing a camera body is no longer especially exotic, since fabrication communities have accumulated pinholes, medium-format bodies, large-format cameras and designs built around salvaged lenses. More than a decade ago, for example, OpenReflex offered a largely printable 35 mm camera in which a mechanical shutter ran at around 1/60 s; relative to that fixed-speed design, Camera Things is trying to make exposure timing a repeatable choice before the photograph is taken.[5](https://amateurphotographer.com/technique/camera_skills/how-to-3d-print-a-camera/)

The difficulty changes once the shutter must do more than open and close a hole. Camera Things began in January 2023 with a pinhole camera whose exposure was controlled by removing and replacing a cap. A later model gained a small lever-operated flap, but the desire for real Canon FD lenses, instead of optics carrying their own shutters, pushed the project into a different class of mechanism.[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xghEQB88wc)

The Canon A-1 used as a reference has a horizontal-travel cloth focal-plane shutter with speeds reaching 1/1000 s.[3](https://global.canon/en/c-museum/product/film100.html) That architecture depends on controlled tension, travel and precision even when manufactured industrially, so translating it into FDM parts with rougher sliding surfaces and desktop-printer tolerances means redesigning the mechanism around the process rather than copying the camera literally.

> Illustration: Close view of Camera Things' 3D-printed shutter mechanism. The mechanism uses sliding strips instead of literally reproducing the cloth curtains of an industrial camera. Credit: [Camera Things / via Hackaday](https://hackaday.com/2026/08/22/the-shutter-makes-this-3d-printed-camera-special/).

## Twelve attempts

The creator says he tried roughly **twelve geared versions** of a horizontal shutter before accumulated friction killed that family of designs, a very ordinary printed-mechanics problem that becomes revealing here because every extra contact contributes roughness, flex and play to a mechanism that looked simple on paper.[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xghEQB88wc)

A rotary detour followed, replacing the rubber band with a printed spring and using an adjustable cover to change the opening while reducing the motion to circular geometry. The idea looked elegant on paper. In practice, by contrast, the prototype never came close to working by its creator’s own account.[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xghEQB88wc)

The current sliding family emerged only after those failures had narrowed the problem.

> 3 YEARS OF PROTOTYPES
> **What failed**
> - Exposure still depends on a hand removing a cap.: Pinhole
> - Gears and horizontal curtains accumulate too much friction.: ~12 attempts
> - Printed spring and adjustable cover: promising idea, unusable prototype.: Rotary
> - Variable slit finally works, but packaging becomes the next failure.: Sliding
> Source: Camera Things' design history.

## The slit

After all of that, the successful mechanism is almost disappointingly simple. Two main strips slide through the body: one carries the slit for exposing the film, while the other covers it during cocking. A third sliding section determines how much of the slit remains uncovered.[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xghEQB88wc)

Cocking pulls the strips together before the blind is pushed back. A small tab, which can lock into one of several positions, defines the opening width; release then sends the assembly across the film under rubber-band tension.[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xghEQB88wc)[2](https://hackaday.com/2026/08/22/the-shutter-makes-this-3d-printed-camera-special/)

Changing slit width changes how long each portion of film receives light, an old focal-plane-shutter principle translated into motion more compatible with printed parts rather than a new optical trick.

What changes for the photographer is the ability to select a setting **before** pressing the shutter. Simpler printed cameras often have a fixed speed or depend more directly on the operator’s motion; Mark Hiltz's Pioneer, for example, uses a simple rotary shutter that Hackaday describes at roughly 1/100 s, with manual long exposure also possible.[4](https://hackaday.com/2025/02/13/a-3d-printed-camera-you-can-now-download-shutter-and-all/)

## Four speeds

Camera Things attempted to measure the prototype and is unusually careful about the limits of those measurements: the first estimate gives four positions around 1/200, 1/400, 1/800 and 1/1600 s, before he immediately qualifies the result and says the real range is probably closer to **1/100 through 1/1000 s**.[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xghEQB88wc)

To be sure, that qualification belongs with the headline result. The prototype produces visibly different exposures and the settings appear to work, yet the demonstration remains a rough timing check rather than laboratory characterization. Four neat numbers on an exposure scale are useful for the experiment, not a substitute for industrial timing data.

The rangefinder offers a parallel lesson: a printed linkage carries focus-wheel position toward a mirror, but the mechanism lacks sufficient precision on the prototype shown, so photographs rely on zone focusing even though the viewfinder framing itself proved close enough to make the camera usable.[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xghEQB88wc)

## Too wide

The fatal problem is geometric. Sliding strips need storage and travel space on both sides of the image, and the creator says the mechanism requires roughly **two extra frame widths on either side**. For the small half-frame image in this prototype, the compromise remains manageable. For a full 35 mm frame, however, the cost of the same principle appears in the body itself: it becomes extremely wide and more expensive to print.[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xghEQB88wc)

> THE COST OF THE SLIT
> **Works, but too wide**
> - The strips still fit inside an experimental body.: Half-frame
> - A wider image also expands strip travel and the storage zones beside it.: 24 × 36 mm
> - A conventional horizontal curtain produced too much resistance in the attempted printed versions.: Friction
> - Move toward vertical metal blades: more compact, much more complicated.: Next
> Camera Things explains the scaling limit at the end of the demonstration.

That scaling penalty is why a functional design is being abandoned. The next mechanism is supposed to resemble the compact shutters found in conventional cameras, using metal blades which travel vertically. Camera Things already has prototypes, reports tolerance problems severe enough to restart them, and wants a more compact mechanism with a wider speed range and actual clockwork.[1](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xghEQB88wc)

No files for that future version exist today, while Hackaday also notes that the sliding prototype’s files have not been released.[2](https://hackaday.com/2026/08/22/the-shutter-makes-this-3d-printed-camera-special/)

## Useful failure

In the end, the reusable result lies in the sequence of decisions around the shutter. An existing architecture is copied, the printing process exposes a friction problem, the mechanism is simplified until it works, and the working prototype is finally judged against the needs of the complete camera rather than the success of one subsystem.

The prototype takes photographs and its shutter settings appear to produce genuinely different exposures, so publishing the files and calling the mechanism finished would have been an understandable ending. Camera Things chose the opposite one because the mechanism revealed its most important limitation at almost exactly the moment it began to work.

That is rarely the spectacular part of a 3D-printing project, although it may be the part that looks most like engineering.

## References

1. [Camera Things, I made the best 3D printable camera, YouTube, August 2026](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xghEQB88wc)
2. [Hackaday, The Shutter Makes This 3D Printed Camera Special, August 22, 2026](https://hackaday.com/2026/08/22/the-shutter-makes-this-3d-printed-camera-special/)
3. [Canon Camera Museum, A-1](https://global.canon/en/c-museum/product/film100.html)
4. [Hackaday, A 3D Printed Camera You Can Now Download, Shutter And All, February 13, 2025](https://hackaday.com/2025/02/13/a-3d-printed-camera-you-can-now-download-shutter-and-all/)
5. [Amateur Photographer, How to 3D print a camera: The OpenReflex camera](https://amateurphotographer.com/technique/camera_skills/how-to-3d-print-a-camera/)