Raspberry Pi Announces The $50 High Quality Camera

[brent]

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

Wow... so much hate. What kind of issues do you have? If you look at the original press release of the Raspberry Pi 3B+, they said "Faster Ethernet" in bold, further explained as "Gigabit Ethernet over USB 2.0" and later in the press release provided benchmark numbers, which showed a peak of around 315 Mbps. They very clearly stated that the device won't be able to actually saturate the wire. The device implements the Gigabit Ethernet standard, so that kinda is what they have to write in the specs somewhere.

This kind of thing isn't uncommon anyway. Did you know that some SBCs with SATA support don't get anywhere close to the expected throughput levels? Others keep the SD interface clocks rather low, which of course limits throughput as well.

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 [I]"...teaching of computing basics to eight-year-olds..."

Again, so much hate, that's quite impressive. Or maybe it's envy? Or both?

[wizard69]

Uh, isn't that pretty obvious? It is high quality compared to the cheap camera modules they have. It obviously doesn't compare well against a high-end smartphone camera, but I hope nobody seriously expects it to at this price point.

By the way, the linked blog post explains it all, but of course you didn't bother to read it.



Look at what fun and interesting projects people have made with the existing camera modules. The new high quality module will open up the platform for even more possibilities, e.g. serious computer vision. Again, this is super obvious. And it completely fits the mission.

It is a massive stretch to say it fits with their education mission, at least as I understand it. But then again some of their offerings are obviously not education related.

[wizard69]

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



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.

Still you have to ask what is the actual results those 108 megapixel cameras can deliver, especially under varying photographic conditions. It is really the end result that counts.

[stormcrow]

"Megapixels" is the only digital camera metric that the average consumer, yes even those buying R-Pis, would understand at a quick glance. It's the same problem Intel ran into when they hit the single threaded power/clock cycle wall in by pushing increasing gigahertz performance to the public many years ago. "High quality" is an opinion for marketing, not a statement of fact. How high a quality it is for the price quoted is a question for the buyer, and compared to their former camera modules (I have one) I'd say it's certainly a higher quality on paper in comparison.

As for the person going on about the Ethernet port, it is a gigabit Ethernet port. Full stop. "Gigabit Ethernet" is an electrical standard for network communications and the R-Pis that have it meet that standard. It doesn't matter it can't reach theoretical wire speed, almost no small SBC can, even pro-sumer routers rarely reach the theoretical wire speeds for gigabit Ethernet. The R-Pi foundation was up front in what throughput it can actually obtain and how it's attached to the main bus, so there's no problems here.

I do foresee DIY home security/monitoring people snatching these up and I'd bet there's going to be amateur radio TV people looking at these closely and probably amateur astronomers... especially for cheap photometry and planetary snapshots.

[tildearrow]

Did you really have to put in a YouTube video for that?! :l

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.

More pixels does not always mean better quality.
As the dot pitch increases, digital noise increases unless better hardware.

Also what is the purpose for this camera?
The Raspberry Pi Foundation have a goal to further education by creating a cheap and open computer, but why are they making a camera?
Is it just because they can? For fun? for profit? Or do they have some vision of furthering education in machine vision and artificial intelligence by pairing a camera with Raspberry Pi?

Look below... :l

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

Too expensive for most users. Remember you can buy an iPhone for a lower price than that, yet it has comparable camera quality.

And just to add, this High Quality camera uses a Sony sensor (they make the sensors for iPhones too)...

Well maybe he was thinking about webcams for streaming and videoconferencing. Most webcams are very poor and seem to have technology from the 90s. It is like 0.3 megapixel sensors and 720p at only 24 or 30 fps.

Wouldn't it be crazy to turn a Raspberry Pi into a cheap but good DSLR?!

[brad0]

since when is the Raspberry Pi not a regular computer? Certain more a computer than a tablet, ... ;-)

Double the core count and bump the clock speed way above 3 GHz then were talking. Until then using a RPi is like using a netbook. netbook's were NOT even close to a replacement for a decent laptop or desktop.

[portablenuke]

Eh...can we get a high quality camera for regular computers? O_o

Capture card attached to the video out of a DSLR/Video camera if normal webcams don't do it or you.

[torsionbar28]

Eh...can we get a high quality camera for regular computers? O_o

There are many options, for many years now. Most DSLR manufacturers offer an SDK where you can attach to a regular PC via USB cable, and then control the camera via software. My company writes software that utilizes this functionality and we've been doing it since 2007. I have a dozen different Canon DSLR's at work that I can stick on a tripod and control with my keyboard and mouse. Nothing new about it.

OTOH, The product in this article is interesting, because it's tailored for Rpi.

[ssokolow]

Didn't take long at all for the room-temperature-IQ, reptilian-complex fanboys to show up; for the cockroaches to come out of the wood-work.

Another one of Eben Upton's "eight-year-old"s heard from.

*********************************

Truth be known, I owe "eight-year-old"s everywhere the sincerest of apologies for the very last comment. Most all eight-year-olds I have ever encountered are FAR more open-minded and objective and than this Dunning-Kruger Effect ("...the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability...") individual. This sort of tripe comes only from the same stupid, self-serving, 20+, 30+, and 40++ year-olds who suffer massive inferiority complexes from having made idiotic choices based solely on herd mentality; and whose total lack of objectivity is surpassed only by their complete lack of critical thinking skills...AND their need to justify their stupidity and idiocy with retorts such as this.

Keep learning, all you eight-year-olds; it won't be long before you're up to a real single-board computer; you know, one which has a real on-board mass -storage device, and for LESS than the toy you're playing with now.

Keep fossilizing, all you others--Upton and Company will be out with another fiasco any time now.

And yet you're the one attacking people's character while brent comes across as making calm, rational points about the disconnect between expectations set by marketing decisions and reality.

[schmidtbag]

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

What's the point of getting such an overkill sensor then? Sure, digital zoom is nice, but nowadays we have phones with zoom lenses. If you don't use digital zoom, you're basically just paying extra for a gimmick.
Meanwhile, keep in mind that phone cameras use a rolling shutter, as opposed to a progressive shutter. That is avery undesirable effect. The more pixels you have, the worse that effect becomes. If you crop the sensor down to something like 1080p to minimize the rolling shutter effect, again, you're defeating the purpose of having such a sensor.

Bear in mind that a 100MP DSLR costs between $10k-$50k. That's not an unreasonable price point for what you're getting (though I sure as hell wouldn't buy one).