Modding the Kodak Reels 8mm Film Digitizer (Firmware Hack)

[wnt2fly]

Hey all an update here from my side. I've sent back both the wolverine pro and the kodak unit, rest assured I captured the ROM from both. That said, I have a heavily modified/custom built wolverine coming with a hawkeye camera installed (search wolverine hawkeye and you'll get info on it). It has a massive sensor and full control over everything, plus it captures to your PC as a string of images. Will share photos and scan results after it arrives.

With that said, I'm not going to abandon you all here. I've got a developer looking into reverse engineering the kodak rom, I hope to have more details soon. We'll see what that will cost for his time and what he thinks he's able to do with it.

Also thanks to @Mac84 he was able to pull out an image from the rom which has probably the manufacture of the unit. I found a reseller (Winait) and they refuse to work w/me on a custom rom.

Stay tuned...

 

[Mac84]

I'm currently working on a video about this whole saga, including new comparison videos, etc. But in that process I'm re-scanning some film with higher settings. I thought I'd share an example. You can sadly see that the auto exposure and white balance put a blue tint to the opening shot here... but still the quality isn't bad. This is film my father shot at the 1964/1965 World's Fair in NY in '65.

Besides adding a title to the video, no picture adjustments have been made.

 

[fishgee]

Hi folks. What a great project thread you've got here. I've been modifying off the shelf stuff to make it do what I want for years. So this might be a lot of fun for 2025. I just received Kodak Reels digitizer from Amazon, "sold by GadgetBasket". To add to the serial number mix, it has a "K" serial: K3124148BKXXXXX.
The menu "About" page shows it is Version 2.0. So I wonder where it is in the manufacturing lineup. I have yet to crack the case on it, although I did tweak the focus ring a bit. The as-is scans don't look too bad so far really. I'm working on a good workflow process for cleaning up and improving the color rendition of the resulting video now.