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Comment by dheera | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Check out Will Whang's work: https://www.willwhang.dev

He and the developer of the Pieca camera (https://teaandtechtime.com/pieca-a-raspberry-pi-camera-syste...) have both been tinkering with 1" sensors, which seems to be the current limit for what kind of sensor works okay with the Pi's CSI interface.

I haven't found a larger sensor that is available to mere mortals yet, but it would be neat to get to 35mm someday.

I suspect the price point the Raspberry Pi targets isn't easily compatible with a truly high quality camera.

As I understand things, the Pi has a single lane of CSI at maybe 1.5 Gbps. That's enough for 1080p video, it's not enough for 4k video.

A high-end smartphone, on the other hand, has more like 5 Gbps of bandwidth to the camera, and the processing power needed to deal with that much data. But the device cost is 10x what an RPi costs, so they can afford it.

I have seen some people work on a Kodak sensor and also Cine Pi's latest work with the IMX585 sensor is really amazing (4K/8K upscaled). The IMX585 sensor is expensive though compared to the HQ Cam IMX477. Here I'm using the Pi Zero 2 here so can't do 4K I believe (data lanes limit or something, also writing to SD card).

Kodak sensor https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma9FrN5COIo

Recent CinePi work https://youtu.be/tI7hIKG1v40?si=BUvOOGutQJDnv09q&t=177

I'm not affiliated with CinePi I'm just amazed what you can do when you know what you're doing ha (eg. color grading)

Thanks for the link to the Kodak sensor - that's awesome, because those sensors have a fairly common interface across all the other Kodak sensors like the 48x36mm Medium format 22MP sensors... It would be pretty easy to adapt this project to make your own CCD medium format camera!

Another good link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QQx0G5MR3k

Trying to find this one where a guy made a sensor stack from scratch it wasn't great like 1 MP but still amazing

This one open source USB 3 camera damn!

https://www.circuitvalley.com/2022/06/pensource-usb-c-indust...

Breaking Taps had a video not long ago covering his efforts to design and fab his own image sensor, though it didn't work and it wouldn't have been anywhere near 1MP even if it had.

I watched that, was amazing, those kind of creators like Applied Science are on another level.

CinePi didn't develop the hardware, that's Will Whang's (https://www.willwhang.dev/OneInchEye/) work.

Ah I did not know that, thanks

there is no market for a 1500$ raspberry pi camera

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