Blu-rays never quite managed to completely usurp DVDs. Recent estimates, based on data collected by Nielsen VideoScan and MediaPlayNews, suggest that DVDs still held 51.4 percent of the market share as of Q2 2022, compared to 48.6 percent for Blu-rays. And regardless of which format has the largest share, the physical media pie is getting smaller and smaller. So if your Blu-ray player has gone from being the centerpiece of your home theater to a dust-collecting ornament, a savvy hacker knows exactly what to do with it.
As spotted this week by Hackster.io, a YouTuber named Doctor Volt recently chronicled their two-part journey to transform a Samsung BD-J5900 Blu-ray player into a laser scanning microscope.
One of the main advantages of the laser scanning microscope over optical ones is that the latter has a maximum magnification of 1500 times, as noted by Gizmodo. Dr. Volt says they’re not sure about the magnification of their DY microscope, but told a commenter that “it can resolve structures around 5 micrometers.”
The Doctor Volt hack was doable because Blu-ray players and laser scanning microscopes work similarly. As a quick simplification, Blu-ray players beam lasers at Blu-ray discs, and depending on how strongly the light is reflected off the player’s optical pickup, the sensors can read either a 1 or a 0.
But because the sensors in the optical pickup aren’t actually binary and can measure varying amounts of reflected light, Blu-ray players are unfavorable candidates for improvised laser scanning microscopes.
As explained by Hackster.io: “By doing the same process and capturing each intensity measurement, one can create an image of the surface of whatever the laser is scanning. The resolution is a function of the physical movement of the laser during scanning .”
Doctor Volt used several parts of the Samsung Blu-ray player for their project, including a laser diode, a stepper motor to move the laser, the optical pick-up, and a focus coil. They also had to make extra plastic parts for a scan bed.
According to Doctor Volt, the microscope creates images using 16,129 measurements, creating a 127×127 pixel image, which the hacker scaled to 512×512 in the image below.
Of course, Doctor Volt’s microscope isn’t nearly as powerful as commercial lab offerings. But when you consider that those could cost tens of thousands of dollars, while Doctor Volt required an outdated gadget you might have around the house or can find cheap, we’d say Doctor Volt did a good job.
The YouTuber isn’t the first to reuse a Blu-ray player to get an enlarged image. In April, professors from the University of Connecticut published the article “Blood-Coated Sensor for High-Throughput Ptychographic Cytometry on a Blu-ray Disc” in ACS Publications. They used a modified Blu-ray player and a blood-coated image sensor to obtain “high-quality images of biological samples,” as UConn’s announcement put it. UConn Technology Commercialization Services filed a provisional patent surrounding the findings.
Doctor Volt shared directions on Hackster.io for turning your Blu-ray player into a laser scanning microscope.
And you can watch the full DIY video, which includes more about the build process and additional images taken with the microscope, below.
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DIY Blu-ray Laser Scanning Microscope: Shooting Images.
