I loved this project the first time it came around. As much as I wanted to build it out myself, I was shocked at how much the components actually cost to put together. It definitely seems like an improvement on the charmera though, so it all comes out in the wash.
It's a shame that, being based on a full-blown Linux SBPC, it has an absolutely unacceptable boot time for a camera. 22 seconds. I can have my iPhone camera out and ready to capture an ephemeral moment of child's play in under 3 seconds, most commercial cameras boot in seconds as well. A film camera can be ready to go the second the lens cap is off. 22 seconds is an eternity in the world of photography. It's a shame that the SoC the Raspberry Pi line is based on has no kernel support (or IIRC hardware support) for S3 or anything similar.
Comparing that to a real camera: I can "quick draw" pick up a Nikon DSLR that's off, flick the power switch and hit the shutter button one handed in one motion as fast as I can move and there's a good picture on the screen as soon as I let go of the trigger. Double click trash can and it's gone. Either will take less than half a second. Battery life is so long I usually forget to charge it. I suspect the power switch is just a "key lock" that prevents triggering anything because there's no delay. Either that or it's a wakeup in the microcontroller range of timing.
(You can easily get jank by filling up the buffer or slow memory card or autofocusing on something impossible, possibly in the dark etc, of course.)
Things lost to time: The Minolta Dimage A1 had contacts for detecting when gripped, so it could ready itself without any button pressed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minolta_Dimage_A1 (You see it in the pic, but its not described in the article).
Sub 2-second booting Linux is generally possible, either by bundling everything into a big image or by creating a fixed hibernation file and resuming from it. That's what they do for real embedded systems, but the downside is that they tend to be monolithic and not so update or modding friendly.
No disrespect to the project here, of course, but I'm wondering why there's no truly high-quality camera for Pis. I have the so-called "high-quality camera" and it still blows. I use it to monitor my 3-D printer with OctoPi, and that's about what it's good for.
> No disrespect to the project here, of course, but I'm wondering why there's no truly high-quality camera for Pis.
Not Pi specific on the camera interface ribbon cable, no, but most any raspberry pi 3b or 4 will work with almost any 'high end, high quality' USB webcam type camera for still image capture using all the same software tools that exist for any debian-based CLI environment.
I wonder why this doesn't use the 4608x2592 resolution the sensor is capable of. It produces cropped 2592x2592 images. Stylistic choice, hopefully not too hard to reconfigure?
Honest question: why would one switch from a much more capable "carry everywhere" smartphone camera to this? Especially since phone is truly carry always & everywhere and that computational processing squeezes out insane amount of photo quality from already excellent phone cameras.
Photos aren't only about quality, especially there days where it's popular to use lower resolution cameras, with worse optics. Specifically for portraits, it's common to use diffusion filters that reduce a bit details/contrast or do that in editing so you don't see every little "defect" on someone's skin.
Some people specifically want something other than their phones because they don't want to always have their phone or use it all the time, others want better controls or a different experience.
This is very cool, it would be huge if this camera could go on fields "traditional cameras" didn't go in, and iphones cannot give. Like an inbetween both where you can add an objective, and send photos to your phone via BLE or something. This would allow for a "professional camera" where you can edit your photos you just took
The output reminds me a little bit in fuzziness of the earliest 640x480 digital cameras from the mid to late 90s that stored images on a 4MB compactflash card.
The one I was impressed with that came out recently is this one https://github.com/Yutani140x/saturnix-camera this one (optocam) is cool it has heart/soul on an aesthetic perspective
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 58.7 ms ] threadIt would be fun to repace the guts with something like this project but a long boot time is a deal breaker.
Perhaps the software can be optimised or a DIY friendly pi pico project is the way.
(You can easily get jank by filling up the buffer or slow memory card or autofocusing on something impossible, possibly in the dark etc, of course.)
https://github.com/IronOxidizer/instant-pi
https://himeshp.blogspot.com/2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberr...
https://kittenlabs.de/blog/2024/09/01/extreme-pi-boot-optimi... (previously featured here too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420597)
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTcP3xeLrEY
Not Pi specific on the camera interface ribbon cable, no, but most any raspberry pi 3b or 4 will work with almost any 'high end, high quality' USB webcam type camera for still image capture using all the same software tools that exist for any debian-based CLI environment.
Edit s/camera/sensor/
Honest question: why would one switch from a much more capable "carry everywhere" smartphone camera to this? Especially since phone is truly carry always & everywhere and that computational processing squeezes out insane amount of photo quality from already excellent phone cameras.
Some people specifically want something other than their phones because they don't want to always have their phone or use it all the time, others want better controls or a different experience.