Quartz 5 Film Camera
Part III
Good things come to those who keep at it till it’s done. Taking apart the Quartz 5 camera was a pleasant challenge, photographing all 340 parts and cleaning them up in Photoshop a bore, and sorting out the mess a devilish molehill of mountainous proportions, but the result is a great sense of achievement and my fourth largest Deconstruction to date: 35,352 x 11,084 pixels, or just short of three metres by one metre when printed at 300 dpi.
An unfortunate side-effect of the ridiculous size of this Deconstruction is that you won’t see much detail when it’s reduced to a width of 1600 pixels, which is the best I can offer online. It’s a necessary evil to prevent bad people from stealing the stuff I one day hope to sell. To make up for that, I’ve included some inserts at 50% of true size to give you an idea of the level of detail in the picture.
Effectively, the composition is a 390+ Megapixels shot. That’s pretty impressive, considering current professional camera’s like the Canon 5D Mark III have ‘only’ 22. The best currently available (Megapixels-wise) seems to be the Hasselblad H5D, which has a 50 MP sensor and can shoot 200 MP shots with a technology called Multi-Shot -basically combining several shots into one, in-camera. There may be even better stuff available, but I don’t usually browse this corner of the shop, as the Hasselblad H5D costs over 20,000 Euros. For now, my 500 Euros Canon EOS 600D will do very nicely.
Anyway, I’m glad I’ve finally managed to complete a true Deconstruction of a complicated device like this. As described in an earlier post, my two previous attempts with a film camera ended in chaos. Which is only natural, but that doesn’t mean I don’t intend to fight it.
I must admit I’m looking forward to a few simple Deconstructions now, notably a cute Philips fan and the legendary Nintendo Game Boy -both are already Under Deconstruction and will probably be finished sometime in May. Maybe after those and a few more simple ones, I’ll have built up the courage to start on something like the Remington typewriter, Minerva sewing machine or IBM ThinkPad that have been patiently awaiting Deconstruction for months.
