Maciej Korsan

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Game Boy Camera photography

bitless.photo: shooting with the original 1998 camera and printing on the Game Boy Printer

  • photography,
  • media
A grid of greenish, pixelated Game Boy Camera photos in frames reading Nintendo and Game Boy: a man's portrait, a festival scene, leaves

I shoot with the original Game Boy Camera – the cartridge with a swivelling lens that Nintendo released in 1998. A photo is 128 × 112 pixels in just four shades, two bits per pixel. There’s nothing to recover in editing: whatever is black stays black. That’s exactly the appeal – limits make me more creative. I post the photos on @bitless.photo: no filters, no AI, just good old Nintendo technology from the 90s.

Up To Date Festival 2024

Every year at Up To Date Festival I do some photo project with an odd camera or an odd technique. In 2024 I covered the whole festival with an original Game Boy and Game Boy Camera, no filters or mods. It’s a night-time electronic music event, so the low light made it a real challenge. Besides shooting the festival, I took portraits of people there, printed them and handed them out on the spot inside small 3D-printed Game Boys.

A grid of pixelated Game Boy Camera photos in a green palette, framed with the Nintendo and Game Boy logos
Part of the Up To Date Festival 2024 set on @bitless.photo.

Getting the photos out

I print on an original Game Boy Printer I brought over from Japan. Its thermal paper is probably more than twenty years old, and the prints fade over time. To get the files off the camera I build my own “printers” – a board that costs around 30 złoty and pretends to be a Game Boy Printer. I pick “print” in the camera menu, then connect to the board over Wi‑Fi and copy the PNGs to my phone. You can choose a palette when transferring, for example the green of the first Game Boy, but it’s still only four colours. I also replaced the memory-backup battery in my cartridge; it has to be soldered in.

In the media

In July 2025 Kanał o technologii, a Polish tech YouTube channel, published a conversation with me about the Game Boy Camera: where the idea came from, how to get photos off it in 2025, printing, and how to get started. We also talked about the Game Boy Camera photo I took of the hosts at the opening of their Games and Technology Museum in Białystok, and about my idea for an album of Game Boy photos for e-readers – an e-paper screen handles four shades of grey really well.

Sources

instagram.com/bitless.photo