How difficult is it to build your own camera?

[Leon Yiu]

After reading the news about Omnivisions forecasted high revenues, I decided to go on their website to have a look at what sensors are available. On looking at the specifications, some of the sensors were capable of an output of 4k at 30fps and some did their full resolution i.e 14mp at 24fps. Obviously these are small sensors, some as 1/4inch the larger ones are 1/2.5 inch. Secondly I highly doubt a company like Omnivision or Sony would be willing to see their sensors even in bulk to a private individual. I've seen the Raspberry Pi mini computer receiving high reviews, I can't remember whether it can encode 1080p video well, just decode, say if it were possible to obtain a sensor from omnivion with a fixed lens attached, and we were able to use several raspberry pis to encode the video how difficult would it be to create our own cameras to our desired speicifications?

[Julian]

I've also been thinking about this. But I think it's way too difficult...

modern sensors in compactcameras are 4K capable. Yet no compact offers 4K video. I think it mostly has to do with the processing power. I don't think a raspberry pi would be able to get 4k video from the sensor and encode it into some usable format. I suppose the most difficult part would probably be making the firmware and making everything work together.

Look at this 12 MP 1/1.7-inch Sony sensor for example: http://www.sony.net/Products/SC-HP/cx_news/vol69/pdf/imx144cqj.pdf
It's been used in the newest compactcameras, like the Samsung EX2F, probably the Nikon P7700 and maybe more.

The sensor specs: 35fps at full resolution. It also has a 4K video mode (4096H x 2160V) at 60fps. Sounds lovely.. But cameras that use this sensor aren't capable of such things.

[Leon Yiu]

It is way too difficult, but I am getting impatient with the big corporations who are not giving consumers what they want. I am also convinced that its possible to make a way better camera than whats being sold. That sony 1/1.7 inch sensor looks really nice, it'd be nice if there was a standardized connector where you could stick it to a processor or an android computer and use apps with customizable recording settings such as frame rates and bit-rates. Then we could use a more powerful graphics card if we wanted. I've recently seen a lot of action cam manufacturers pop out of nowhere, I wonder what kind of engineering talent or software coding people they have.

I guess you can't just stack many graphics card together in parallel like you can a battery or electronics components, I think for the jvc 4k cam, you record a quarter of the image on each sd card. Considering you can get cameras which do 1080p for £100 I can't imagine the processors they use costing that much, I think on ifixit, the iphone camera sensor was something like $28 but obviously we want to be using something better.

Its a shame electronics are mostly made by large corporations rather than hobbyists, but I am hopeful that the manufacturing process will increasingly become decentralised and this is something that can happen sooner rather than later.

On my satellite at home cnn is 4:3 sd, but on youtube I can see cnn clips in 1080i hd and it streams fine, bbc news isn't even shown in hd, I don't understand why it costs them so much when on youtube people with their phones can make higher quality recordings than what you see on the news.

I read that the usual 15inch macbook screen costs $64 whereas the retina screen costs $164. If a monitor were to be made from that screen they'd probably charge 5 times that.