This paper shows that a DFS-8 long-focus spectrograph can be converted into a modern automatic spectrometer with high resolving power and digital recording of small sections of the spectrum by means of a reflex camera. A technique has been developed for converting the two-dimensional irradiance distribution recorded by a CMOS detector array into a spectral distribution of radiation intensity. The calibrated spectrometer makes it possible in the fully automatic regime to record not only sets of individual windows (sections of the spectrum about 1.6 nm wide) at the experimenter’s choice, but also survey spectra in the 400–700-nm wavelength range by successively measuring windows with a specified overlap. Studies of the emission spectra of a glow discharge in an Ar–Hg mix and of a capillary-arc discharge in pure hydrogen made it possible to determine the main characteristics of the spectrometer: a maximum resolving power of up to 2 105, a linear dispersion of 0.077–0.065 nm/mm, a dynamic range of measurable int