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Comment by hijp | Hacker News Reader

I like this a lot because of its inconspicuous design. Are there any other security cameras that aren't bulky?

You can get an iphone 6s camera replacement for around $40, it seems like the quality is far superior to the current consumer security cameras on the market - so why are ring and nest the only options?

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I've had the same wish, but AFAIK cell phone cameras use proprietary interfaces and are not very useful on their own. They require a GPU and chipset. You'd have to include nearly the entire phone to make use of an iPhone 6s camera.

Most cell phones actually use off the shelf sensors and interfaces. It's an easy way to allow differentiation -- have the same mainboard, but different screen sizes, cameras, etc for different lines. I can't find info on the 6s exactly, but previous lines used standard Omnivision imaging chips that spoke over the same CSI-2 interface used by everyone else, and found even on boards like the raspberry pi.

Do you know of anyone who's successfully used an iPhone camera in a hobby project? I looked around a bit and wasn't able to find anything. Here's someone with some older camera modules...[0] Didn't sound too hopeful. I'm not an expert on the subject though, you may be right.

https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/22963/using-...

I think a lot of the limitations on video quality are related to streaming /storage capabilities. Ultra HD (8 megapixels) is not particularly feasible to stream or probably compress efficiently in a small cheap package.

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