4 ms·

I really really really wish RPi would come out with a real HQ camera with at least an APS-C if not 36x24mm sensor. This dinky little IMX477 sensor is MQ, not HQ

by dheera 6y ago

I really really really wish RPi would come out with a real HQ camera with at least an APS-C if not 36x24mm sensor. This dinky little IMX477 sensor is MQ, not HQ. The uses would be endless, ranging from astrophotography to real professional-quality shots with homemade, scriptable cameras; shots synced with high-speed motion; a whole new era of homemade SLRs and mirrorless cameras that are actually competent; lots of things I can think of.

JKCalhoun 6y ago
I agree, it would be nice, but is there no way for you or me to construct such a thing using some existing chipset or module and constructing an interface to the Raspberry Pi?
terramex 6y ago
RPI HQ camera is almost usable for astrophotography, here are few shots I did with it last year: https://terramex.neocities.org/astro/ https://terramex.neocities.org/astro/ Of course it make little sense from financial point of view as good star tracker and optics are magnitudes more expensive but it was fun. I agree with rest of your post. Even MFT-size sensor would be great as there are plenty great lenses with that image circle size.
- dheera 6y ago
  Yeah it's barely usable, but not great, because ultimately larger sensors will still give you better SNR for astrophotography. A sensor with 10X the area will be able to produce an image with the same final SNR in 1/10 the time. Also I had lots of faint banding issues with RPi cameras. Nobody was able to solve my problem on forums. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=287866 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=287866
  - terramex 6y ago
    I've seen similar banding in some tests when I had set analog gain to 1.0 on a warm night. With analog gain set to 16.0 and Peltier cooler attached to back of camera PCB it was gone. My guess is that IMX477 does some software de-noise that causes banding. I tested this guess by calculating power spectrum of a dark frame and there was noticeable drop in higher frequencies. Unfortunately, even disabling hot-pixel detection did not help. I did not investigate it further.
    - dheera 6y ago
      > Peltier cooler attached to back of camera PCB Do you have plans or pics of how to do this? Especially how to do it without getting condensation on the electronics? Thanks!
      - terramex 6y ago
        Honestly, it is just a frankenstein monster of whatever I had on hand: https://imgur.com/a/QhvmbUa https://imgur.com/a/QhvmbUa 3mm thermal pad I used between PCB and cooler: https://botland.store/thermoconductive-tapes-pastes/6060-thermo-conductive-tape-ag-thermopad-30x30x3mm-15wmk-5901764327561.html?SubmitCurrency=1&id_currency=4 https://botland.store/thermoconductive-tapes-pastes/6060-the... Radiator (I used the smaller one that typically goes on cold side of Peltier): https://botland.store/peltier-elements/10024-heatsink-with-a-92mm-fan-for-the-peltier-40mm-cell.html https://botland.store/peltier-elements/10024-heatsink-with-a... Fan is standard 40mmx40mm, there is some generic copper thermal paste between Peltier and radiator. The plywood mount is DIY made with with hole drills. It is a bit too thick so I used 2x C-CS mount adapters (like the one bundled with the camera) to get more space, otherwise I would not be able to screw in lens adapter. There was a bit of neoprene foam between radiator and fan to reduce vibrations but it looks like I lost it somewhere. About condensation: it was always wet or even icy in operation but it never caused any electrical issues, I guess condensed water was not very conductive? Once on a cold night (about 5C) I had water condensation on the sensor itself but it did not cause any lasting damage. I've read that putting a fresh silica gel desiccant packet into lens adapter helps. I had plans to attach temperature probe to lens mount and control cooling power form Pi itself, will get back to it in the future. The camera sensor itself has embedded thermometer but it is not exposed in camera driver.
- mnw21cam 6y ago
  I'm just comparing your Bode's Galaxy (f/3.3, 200mm, 120x21s) with my recent attempt (f/6.3, 600mm, 42x30s), and besides magnification, the result seems fairly similar - if anything, I think the dark sections of your image are less noisy. Your arrangement collected about 7.2 times as much light (ignoring magnification), so that's not surprising. I was using a Nikon D7500, so if the RPI HQ camera is comparing reasonably favourably with that, then yes that's not bad.
- walrus01 6y ago
  This makes me wonder what sort of semi-pro astrophotography might be possible using a disassembled small cinema camera (black magic pocket 6k, for instance, or a similar priced full frame mirrorless or DSLR) with a peltier cooler or refrigerant loop heatsink attached to its back side. How close could one get in performance to a very costly astrophotography setup, for under $10k? Not counting the cost of the telescope/optics in front of it, just talking about the sensor part.
PragmaticPulp 6y ago
APS-C sensors are still significantly more expensive than common sensors like the IMX477. Demand would be much lower due to the high price for the sensor and additional cost for lenses and mounting hardware. RPi foundation isn't really targeted at the niche, high-end, low-volume markets that demand the best of the best. They're great at delivering an excellent compromise of cost and quality. The IMX477 is just right for most use cases. 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. The open source options are improving, but connecting an APS-C sensor to an R-Pi wouldn't automatically give you a DIY SLR competitor. You'd spend a lot more in the process and get worse results than just buying a commercial SLR camera and running open-source scriptable firmware like Magic Lantern: https://magiclantern.fm/ https://magiclantern.fm/
- porphyra 6y ago
  APS-C sensors are maybe only a few hundred bucks. 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.
  - dheera 6y ago
    > At present it is nearly impossible to get something like that So in the astrophotography world they exist. This for example: https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asi6200mc-pro-color https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asi6200mc-pro-c... uses an IMX455 full frame sensor, gives you a reasonably hackable full frame camera (not that well supported, but there are grassroots libraries around) but it's $4000 because it's also a cooled camera. If they had a version of it that's not cooled and just for normal photography for $1000 that'd be awesome.
bmurphy1976 6y ago
Also fix the interface so that you can actually record 4k video. The sensor is capable but the interface is not. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=281095 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=281095

by dheera 6y ago

JKCalhoun 6y ago

I agree, it would be nice, but is there no way for you or me to construct such a thing using some existing chipset or module and constructing an interface to the Raspberry Pi?

terramex 6y ago

RPI HQ camera is almost usable for astrophotography, here are few shots I did with it last year: https://terramex.neocities.org/astro/ https://terramex.neocities.org/astro/ Of course it make little sense from financial point of view as good star tracker and optics are magnitudes more expensive but it was fun. I agree with rest of your post. Even MFT-size sensor would be great as there are plenty great lenses with that image circle size.

dheera 6y ago
Yeah it's barely usable, but not great, because ultimately larger sensors will still give you better SNR for astrophotography. A sensor with 10X the area will be able to produce an image with the same final SNR in 1/10 the time. Also I had lots of faint banding issues with RPi cameras. Nobody was able to solve my problem on forums. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=287866 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=287866
- terramex 6y ago
  I've seen similar banding in some tests when I had set analog gain to 1.0 on a warm night. With analog gain set to 16.0 and Peltier cooler attached to back of camera PCB it was gone. My guess is that IMX477 does some software de-noise that causes banding. I tested this guess by calculating power spectrum of a dark frame and there was noticeable drop in higher frequencies. Unfortunately, even disabling hot-pixel detection did not help. I did not investigate it further.
  - dheera 6y ago
    > Peltier cooler attached to back of camera PCB Do you have plans or pics of how to do this? Especially how to do it without getting condensation on the electronics? Thanks!
    - terramex 6y ago
      Honestly, it is just a frankenstein monster of whatever I had on hand: https://imgur.com/a/QhvmbUa https://imgur.com/a/QhvmbUa 3mm thermal pad I used between PCB and cooler: https://botland.store/thermoconductive-tapes-pastes/6060-thermo-conductive-tape-ag-thermopad-30x30x3mm-15wmk-5901764327561.html?SubmitCurrency=1&id_currency=4 https://botland.store/thermoconductive-tapes-pastes/6060-the... Radiator (I used the smaller one that typically goes on cold side of Peltier): https://botland.store/peltier-elements/10024-heatsink-with-a-92mm-fan-for-the-peltier-40mm-cell.html https://botland.store/peltier-elements/10024-heatsink-with-a... Fan is standard 40mmx40mm, there is some generic copper thermal paste between Peltier and radiator. The plywood mount is DIY made with with hole drills. It is a bit too thick so I used 2x C-CS mount adapters (like the one bundled with the camera) to get more space, otherwise I would not be able to screw in lens adapter. There was a bit of neoprene foam between radiator and fan to reduce vibrations but it looks like I lost it somewhere. About condensation: it was always wet or even icy in operation but it never caused any electrical issues, I guess condensed water was not very conductive? Once on a cold night (about 5C) I had water condensation on the sensor itself but it did not cause any lasting damage. I've read that putting a fresh silica gel desiccant packet into lens adapter helps. I had plans to attach temperature probe to lens mount and control cooling power form Pi itself, will get back to it in the future. The camera sensor itself has embedded thermometer but it is not exposed in camera driver.
mnw21cam 6y ago
I'm just comparing your Bode's Galaxy (f/3.3, 200mm, 120x21s) with my recent attempt (f/6.3, 600mm, 42x30s), and besides magnification, the result seems fairly similar - if anything, I think the dark sections of your image are less noisy. Your arrangement collected about 7.2 times as much light (ignoring magnification), so that's not surprising. I was using a Nikon D7500, so if the RPI HQ camera is comparing reasonably favourably with that, then yes that's not bad.
walrus01 6y ago
This makes me wonder what sort of semi-pro astrophotography might be possible using a disassembled small cinema camera (black magic pocket 6k, for instance, or a similar priced full frame mirrorless or DSLR) with a peltier cooler or refrigerant loop heatsink attached to its back side. How close could one get in performance to a very costly astrophotography setup, for under $10k? Not counting the cost of the telescope/optics in front of it, just talking about the sensor part.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago

APS-C sensors are still significantly more expensive than common sensors like the IMX477. Demand would be much lower due to the high price for the sensor and additional cost for lenses and mounting hardware. RPi foundation isn't really targeted at the niche, high-end, low-volume markets that demand the best of the best. They're great at delivering an excellent compromise of cost and quality. The IMX477 is just right for most use cases. 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. The open source options are improving, but connecting an APS-C sensor to an R-Pi wouldn't automatically give you a DIY SLR competitor. You'd spend a lot more in the process and get worse results than just buying a commercial SLR camera and running open-source scriptable firmware like Magic Lantern: https://magiclantern.fm/ https://magiclantern.fm/

porphyra 6y ago
APS-C sensors are maybe only a few hundred bucks. 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.
- dheera 6y ago
  > At present it is nearly impossible to get something like that So in the astrophotography world they exist. This for example: https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asi6200mc-pro-color https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asi6200mc-pro-c... uses an IMX455 full frame sensor, gives you a reasonably hackable full frame camera (not that well supported, but there are grassroots libraries around) but it's $4000 because it's also a cooled camera. If they had a version of it that's not cooled and just for normal photography for $1000 that'd be awesome.

bmurphy1976 6y ago

Also fix the interface so that you can actually record 4k video. The sensor is capable but the interface is not. https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=281095 https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=281095