Raspberry PI camera as telecine sensor for digitizing super 8mm?

I found this describing how to modify the camera on the raspberry pi
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4279

I figured it might be a candidate for camera for transferrig Super 8mm to HD and decided to try how good the macro was.

I tried the rubber-eraser trick mentioned mentioned on the site and saw i could easely unscrew the lens with my fingers. It was not that hard. about 2 turn out and the lens come loose.

I ran this command on the pi using putty to grab an image:
raspistill -o kodak.jpg
There is a small preview window on the display on the pi that made it easy to find focus distace of approx 2-3cm.

Transferred the image to my computer using WinSCP and checked out the result:

The image quality seems good enough but seems like i only will get 814x 524 of video resolution out of this. Not enought for now so more drastic measures are needed to get the lens further out to make it fill more of the sensor.

I tried reversing the lens but then was not able to focus even with the film toutching the lens.

Then i tried to jam a bit of tape in the hole to make the lens stay longer out in the fixture

This is the result:



Paint tells me it possible to get 1080p height from one Super 8mm frame height. Exactly what I am after. Never mind the white balance. The red LED from the camera module is causing weird lighting. That will need to be covered or removed. But this looks promising.