APS-C might be a tough ask, but something like this[1] or this[2] might work - smaller sensor but at least you won’t get a ridiculous crop factor on APS-C lenses. The second one says it’s format is APS-like.
But I’d say an RPi alone would be a bit tough to handle something like this. You’d need at least an FPGA to control the sensor and maybe something like RPi for UI and further processing.
But it’ll be expensive. These components are anything between $500 and $3000, and that’s _without_ the FPGA and other things that would be required. An equivalent crop frame camera might be only $1000(?). If the aim is to have a DIY hackable camera, sure. If you want a cheap camera, no...
I would love to have a nice APS-C or full frame board-level camera that can be easily integrated into something like a Raspberry Pi. At present it is nearly impossible to get something like that --- dev kits for large sensors from Sony Semicon, Canon, and ams are profoundly expensive, only sold to companies, and go through a lengthy quoting process.
> The sensor alone doesn't deliver 100% of the result of a modern SLR. The image processing code does a lot of heavy lifting that is mostly proprietary.
This is HN, hackers like us love to be able to tinker with the heavy lifting. That's the whole point of the Raspberry Pi cameras. Even with the current HQ camera, a used point-and-shoot camera with a similarly-sized sensor (or even bigger sensor) would tend to produce better images and videos while being more compact, robust, convenient, and cheaper than the DIY camera.
Everything you described can be built out with this existing sensor and hardware.
You don't need an APS-C or larger sensor to get decent images. Most APS-C sensors use a different high-speed interface that won't work with the Raspberry Pi anyway.
Really, this solution from the Raspberry Pi foundation is a great start for any of the projects you mentioned. It's also cheap and highly available.
I just really wish Raspberry Pi would come out with a truly HQ camera with a full frame 35mm sensor, or at least an APS-C sensor. I'd pay $1000-1500 for it, just to have something as good as a full frame camera but programmable and hackable.
I would love to build a full frame mirrorless camera that runs my own UI. I'm pretty sure I could code a much more advanced UI than Sony or Canon.
Their current HQ camera is more like an LQ camera and there is not a huge variety of high quality photographic lenses available for it.
There is at least one reason that an itty-bitty sensor like this would be interesting - you could use all C-mount and possibly even 16mm or 8mm lenses with it. That is a world of lenses that is relatively unexploited in the APS-C and M43 worlds.
But honestly, unless this camera is both cheap and programmable, it's dead in the water.
Often it's the lens that results in poor quality images. You can get a RPi sensor with CS mount and add your own lens of your choosing. It's been a huge upgrade in quality and is relatively easy to do.
Traditional cameras--and the more traditional you get the truer this probably gets--have been fairly, well, terrible is probably not too overstated in software. One could probably make nationalistic--or at least industry related--comments related to that but I won't. (BTW I have significant Canon and Fuji systems.) It's also probably the case that the buyers of those cameras were traditionally fine with software that was pretty hands-off.
But, yes, if you combined APS-C Fuji, say, with the software available in an iPhone you'd have a really impressive instrument and presumably we'll get there some day.
There are options atm… just not on-device. There’s CHDK, https://chdk.fandom.com/wiki/CHDK which changes the firmware of certain Canon compact cameras to add (among other things) RAW output. It should help you get the max out of your sensor.
Then again, the first generation of pocketable mirrorless cameras with APS-C sized sensors (which are much bigger & high quality than those found in pocket cameras, or the one used in the article’s hack) should be pretty accessible right now… ie Fuji x-t10, canon m1/2/3. The Canon M1 also takes Magic Lantern which adds raw video ! (Albeit with a significant crop factor).
I was thinking about this yesterday while looking for resources on building a board to read data from a modern sensor from something like an a7 (turns out its way over my head). The issue you’d run into with the pi hq camera module assuming you can get the focal plane right and everything to fit is that the sensor is way smaller than 35 film so you’ll have a rather large crop factor.
When I looked, most parts-house available sensors are small and even a 1" format sensors are pretty dear. MFT, APS-C, etc. were a multiple of a complete entry level interchangeable lens camera. For a pinhole camera with a small sensor, it's going to be hard to frame a specific subject because the sensor's field of view is tiny. Even a wire viewfinder will probably struggle with framing due to parallax. Basically the low cost sensor for pinhole photography is photo-chemical film.
A hacky alternative for a might be modifying a flatbed scanner. Just step the photo array slowly enough that there's reasonable exposure at each point. The good part is that a flatbed scanner is a stupid big sensor and there is some literature for hacking them. But for a pinhole, I'd expect the exposures to be rather long even for pinhole photography.
Do you have any examples of this? I've been interested in building this Pi camera using a lens with a shallow depth of field, but it's very hard to figure out a lens to get that will work with the Pi, look right if mounted from around 2 to 3 feet away, and have a decent quality picture.
After spending a bunch of time researching, I got this feeling if I pursue this project I'll end up with hundreds of dollars of bad lenses and just wish I would have bought a real DSLR or mirrorless camera that connects via USB.
Unfortunately that's too high of a cost; this would be mostly for serious hobby / side project use and the stock cameras are extremely limited in programmability.
How awesome would an updated iSight be today? You could fit an APC-C sized sensor (1.6x crop DSLR) with a 22mm f/2 pancake lens for some insane bokeh. Probably at around the $300 price point. Sure would be easier than hooking a "clean HDMI" DSLR or mirrorless into a HDMI input/USB adaptor...
I've spent a bunch of time thinking about ways to do something like this on a budget. The general idea would be to have a bunch of bare camera sensors directly connected to commodity PCs (maybe with Arduinos interfacing between them) with each PC driving multiple camera sensors.
The bandwidth requirements are quite ridiculous when you want to take a hundred photos simultaneously, so I'm not sure how many sensors I could really drive with one PC.
You can't do that because no one is building general-purpose computers into DSLRs - or, for that matter, MILCs - because no one cares about that use case, and the resources wasted on making it possible are better spent on supporting the things that photographers expect cameras to do.
That said, you probably could do something like that with sufficient effort invested in CHDK or Magic Lantern or whatever the current homebrew Canon firmware project is lately. I'll be fascinated to see what you come up with!
But I’d say an RPi alone would be a bit tough to handle something like this. You’d need at least an FPGA to control the sensor and maybe something like RPi for UI and further processing.
But it’ll be expensive. These components are anything between $500 and $3000, and that’s _without_ the FPGA and other things that would be required. An equivalent crop frame camera might be only $1000(?). If the aim is to have a DIY hackable camera, sure. If you want a cheap camera, no...
[1] https://media.digikey.com/pdf/Data%20Sheets/Canon%20USA%20PD... [2] https://ams.com/documents/20143/36005/CMV12000_DS000603_3-00...
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