Wayne Morellini
August 13th, 2008, 07:53 AM
My health is still getting trashed, and I am still busy with submissions, but the creative ideas and design ability is still flowing. As I am not going to get well enough to attempt this, I would like to share the following project, which is for a cheap easy low end Indie Cam.
There has been many HD pocket cameras starting at prices around $99US, with 1080p30/720p60 models closer to $199 and above based on Micron sensors. The Micron sensors have substantially improved. The quality might be shocking (rolling shutter at 1080p30 is disastrous) but descent footage can be had with careful handling, but still not professional.
New Camera:
Manufacturers even do OEM orders (and hopefully with requested enhancements like live HDMI out and those below) lens mount and manual controls. Which I urge the group to look at. If such a product was just a slightly modified version of their conventional model (possibly keeping the present lens) a standard model could be based on it and the cost of your batch of these cameras be similarly priced, around $200. This is considerably cheaper than what anybody is offering.
Possibilities:
So, why bother. Somebody has replaced the lens with a mount. I don't know, but maybe the sensor can be separated from the camera for those people that want to find a cheap source for Micron sensors, this is less than $99, much cheaper than mucking around with unsupported machine vision cameras. You could possibly tap the digital or analogue HD video feed in circuit (FPGA people, perfect little, and I mean little, project to repackage data to a format that a disk can except, or HDMI for external recorder, camera and lens have their own controls).
To reduce rolling shutter, shock horror, get an external shutter. Something I did not tell people I had planned for my lens adaptor to handle this problem etc.
Lastly, I think the ambarella chip possibly has a range of performance set in the cameras firmware, and this might be able to be setup differently, and controls, even rawdified (4:4:4 converted to bayer) data dumped to USB2.0, or card (if fast enough), with simple compression to fit the bandwidth, or HDMI live output enabled. But realistically, a appropriate amount of h264 bandwidth could be had, and hopefully HDMI out.
The lens mod, interesting:
http://forums.steves-digicams.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=595093&forum_id=92
Poking around the threads you can find other mods etc to different cameras, and 1080p ones.
I leave it with you guys, as I know some of you have an interest in ambarella and Micron stuff, and DIY.
There has been many HD pocket cameras starting at prices around $99US, with 1080p30/720p60 models closer to $199 and above based on Micron sensors. The Micron sensors have substantially improved. The quality might be shocking (rolling shutter at 1080p30 is disastrous) but descent footage can be had with careful handling, but still not professional.
New Camera:
Manufacturers even do OEM orders (and hopefully with requested enhancements like live HDMI out and those below) lens mount and manual controls. Which I urge the group to look at. If such a product was just a slightly modified version of their conventional model (possibly keeping the present lens) a standard model could be based on it and the cost of your batch of these cameras be similarly priced, around $200. This is considerably cheaper than what anybody is offering.
Possibilities:
So, why bother. Somebody has replaced the lens with a mount. I don't know, but maybe the sensor can be separated from the camera for those people that want to find a cheap source for Micron sensors, this is less than $99, much cheaper than mucking around with unsupported machine vision cameras. You could possibly tap the digital or analogue HD video feed in circuit (FPGA people, perfect little, and I mean little, project to repackage data to a format that a disk can except, or HDMI for external recorder, camera and lens have their own controls).
To reduce rolling shutter, shock horror, get an external shutter. Something I did not tell people I had planned for my lens adaptor to handle this problem etc.
Lastly, I think the ambarella chip possibly has a range of performance set in the cameras firmware, and this might be able to be setup differently, and controls, even rawdified (4:4:4 converted to bayer) data dumped to USB2.0, or card (if fast enough), with simple compression to fit the bandwidth, or HDMI live output enabled. But realistically, a appropriate amount of h264 bandwidth could be had, and hopefully HDMI out.
The lens mod, interesting:
http://forums.steves-digicams.com/forums/view_topic.php?id=595093&forum_id=92
Poking around the threads you can find other mods etc to different cameras, and 1080p ones.
I leave it with you guys, as I know some of you have an interest in ambarella and Micron stuff, and DIY.