It’s a problem as old as photography: your camera is only as good as your lens. As cameras shrink, so do lenses, and so do the options for upgrading to a better lens. And forget about switching to a different focal length or aperture — it’s often just not an option. Unless you make it an option by adding a CS lens mount to a high-end webcam.
We’ll stipulate that at 4k resolution and packed with all sorts of goodies, the Logitech Brio Pro is a heck of a nice camera. And the lens isn’t bad either, as you’d hope for a camera with almost 9 megapixels at its disposal. But with an optical field of view optimized for video conferencing, it’s hard to use this premium camera for much else. [Saulius] fixed that by taking the camera apart and adding a new case with a built-in C- and CS-mount, resulting in literally thousands of lens choices. [Saulius]’ post has valuable teardown information, which includes exposing the CCD sensor completely. The new case is sold as a kit, but it looks like a 3D-printed case would be pretty easy to whip up.
[Salius] sure seems to love those optical hacks, whether they be a budget microscope camera, high-resolution LIDAR, or capturing license plates at great distances.
I’ve looked at some older digital cameras and thought that I would like to try something like this.
But for me the cost of a 3-D printer and supplies is on par or above just buying a “last generation” DSLR and the same lenses that would be used in the aforementioned project.
Buying the kit, from the article, and the web cam, would be cheaper.
But then you seem to have lost the portability of a “ordinary” camera body.
I guess that it’s largely down to what you want to do with the data/imagery from the camera.
Some type of streaming of images/video that a tethered camera provides or the more random/candid photography/videography that a “regular” camera lends itself to?
I’d advise top just buy a 4K action cam from China and to modify that. Or even a cheaper cellphone with a 4K cam
A DSLR has lenses that are way too big, and even a system camera with the smaller sensor has big lenses that are unwieldy.
CCD ?
CMOS surely.
“Parts avilable on the estore”
In the interess of fairness, lets just critque that they don’t provide any datasheets for their lenses other than a rough spec. They could be analogue quality glass for all we know.
The range of 4K rated C/CS lenses is numerous, but it’s not “literlaly thousands” unless you are happy using a derated pixel lower quality lens on your 4K camera. Which you might be ok with depending on your purposes.
I wonder how long you can make those flex wires to the camera module of action cams and phones.
I know they had an action cam where people could extend the flexcable to mount the module further away, but the extension wasn’t very long, so I wonder how far you could extend it with a quality flexcable with low-loss wire.
I guess experimentation would be the only way to find out for sure since we don’t know the tolerances of the driver/receivers.
Bit off topic to this camera though, sorry about that.