Raspberry Pi Announces The $50 High Quality Camera

[L_A_G]

I never really understood the point of the camera interface or the dedicated camera port and hardware on the rPi when it's got standard USB ports that you can use to connect any USB webcam you'd want to. Even less so when before this the official camera modules before this one have been equivalent to a low end USB webcam and this one isn't even particularly high end for a webcam.

If we were talking about a much lower end SBC or a microcontroller I could understand this, but for the rPi this just sounds like feature creep causing redundant functionality.

[Guest]

I hope someone will make an adapter that makes this camera module usable with standard PCs (interface to something like USB). It would be a nice "high-quality" webcam for people who livestream, and potentially other applications, maybe using it to make 3D scans of objects, where computing power and memory of RPi might not suffice.

[danmcgrew]

[QUOTE=uid313;n1176007]What makes this a "high quality camera" other than the Raspberry Pi Foundation branding it as such?

The answer, of course, is, "Absolutely not one thing."
You , obviously, are among the very many who remember for how long and often the Raspberry Pi group steadfastly maintained--even to the point of disbursing this misleading information to the trade press--that their RPI3 was a "...Gigabit Ethernet..." device, when it would ONLY run at 330 MHz under the best of circumstances

The Raspberry Pi Foundation / Trading Group / Eben Upton / Liz Upton are absolutely and unquestionably without peer at grandstanding and 'show-boating'; at "blowing their own horn". The very fact that this group has even devoted not-inconsiderable amounts of resources (time; money; highly-questionable in-house engineering design "talent") prove this beyond a shadow of a doubt. And this on a peripheral device meant for a product whose sole purpose is for the "...teaching of computing basics to eight-year-olds..."

The Raspberry Pi Foundation / Trading Group / Eben Upton /Liz Upton need to concentrate on the one thing which history has proven that they're better at than doing any form of engineering design or product development: publishing magazines. Even there, they have made a poor and highly-questionable choice.

[willmore]

I never really understood the point of the camera interface or the dedicated camera port and hardware on the rPi when it's got standard USB ports that you can use to connect any USB webcam you'd want to. Even less so when before this the official camera modules before this one have been equivalent to a low end USB webcam and this one isn't even particularly high end for a webcam.

If we were talking about a much lower end SBC or a microcontroller I could understand this, but for the rPi this just sounds like feature creep causing redundant functionality.

For the first generations--the ones that only had *one* USB 2.0 HS OTG port for both USB and ethernet, it made sense to go through a lot of effort to keep cameras and displays off that bus. Now that they have a USB3 port, it's not as much of an issue, but they've kept those ports for this long, there are people who have come to depend on them and they're stuck with them. The only thing that the Rpi boards have going for them is their 'community' which is to say years and years of accumulated 'this is how you do X' how-to's. If they remove the display connector or the camera connector, they break all of those. At that point, what's the point of using an Rpi? Might as well move to something with better hardware to start with.

[skeevy420]

They're probably already using something like the AXIOM from the Apertus project.

For on the cheap astrophotography? That's too much, man. It is cool as hell, though.

Telescope ready CMOS cameras with cooling systems start at around $100-$200 for entry level stuff and that's a $2500+ system not even in mass production. What you suggest and what the RPi offers and I'm suggesting are two completely different levels of DIY. You don't build around an RPi (and Arduino) for the quality, you do it for the price and fun-ness tinkering with stuff brings.

[RamaSpaceShip]

I hope someone will make an adapter that makes this camera module usable with standard PCs (interface to something like USB). It would be a nice "high-quality" webcam for people who livestream, and potentially other applications, maybe using it to make 3D scans of objects, where computing power and memory of RPi might not suffice.

The adapter already exists: it's a Raspberry Pi

[schmidtbag]

What makes this a "high quality camera" other than the Raspberry Pi Foundation branding it as such?
The 12 megapixel sensor sounds very old, now with phones out there with 100+ megapixel cameras.

MP count isn't the same thing as quality. A phone camera that actually has 100MP will not yield much better results than a phone camera with 16MP. There's a lot of reasons for this, but a lot of it comes down to:
* lens quality. Most tiny cameras have cheap imperfect lenses.
* aperture size. A small aperture limits the light, which then requires you to increase ISO/gain, which makes your images look worse. You can use software to fix this, but then you're either downscaling the image (where the higher pixel count is moot) or your image looks like a painting.
* sensor size. A larger sensor can collect more light with less noise.
* compression. If you want to minimize lossy quality, 100MP is going to use up a lot of disk space very quickly. If you compress it to a more reasonable disk size, you lose a substantial amount of detail you could have otherwise gained from such a sensor.

And that's just the quality related issues. There are other problems with high-MP phone cameras.


There's a reason why professionals don't really go much higher than 32MP. Of course, there are cameras that go higher, but they're more specialty or niche cases, and extremely expensive, because professionals understand that a no-compromise higher pixel count requires no ordinary sensor or processor.

[linuxjacques]

The adapter already exists: it's a Raspberry Pi

Heh I was going to say the same thing. You can get a Pi Zero for $5.

[NotMine999]

What makes this a "high quality camera" other than the Raspberry Pi Foundation branding it as such?
The 12 megapixel sensor sounds very old, now with phones out there with 100+ megapixel cameras.

I call BS on the claim you make that I have highlighted in bold. Yet again, empty claims with no supporting proof...unlike another poster in this same thread that posted an actual link.

[uid313]

compression. If you want to minimize lossy quality, 100MP is going to use up a lot of disk space very quickly. If you compress it to a more reasonable disk size, you lose a substantial amount of detail you could have otherwise gained from such a sensor.

I think the phones can capture in 100 megapixel then scale it down to save it in something like 1080p.

I call BS on the claim you make that I have highlighted in bold. Yet again, empty claims with no supporting proof...unlike another poster in this same thread that posted an actual link.

Check out the Samsung Galaxy S20 it got a 108 megapixel camera.
Check out the Xiaomi Mi Note 10 it also got a 108 megapixel camera.
Oh, and there is also the Motorola Edge+ with a 108 megapixel camera too.