Raspberry Pi Camera Group Test

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time we're going to do a group test of three different raspberry pi cameras so we can see just what the differences are between the cheaper and more expensive models so let's go and delve into some raspberry pi image capture right the three cameras we're going to test are the zero cam which is also sold as a zero spy camera the raspberry pi camera version 2 and the raspberry pi high quality camera these span a range of price points with the zero cam currently selling for about 20 or 15 pounds the pi version 2 camera costing about 30 or 24 pounds and the high quality camera priced at about 50 or 50 pounds this said note that the high quality camera does not include a lens so this will be an additional cost for most users for image capture the xerocam has a 5 megapixel sensor with a maximum resolution of 2592 by 1944. meanwhile the pi version 2 camera has an 8 megapixel sensor with a maximum resolution of 3280x2464 and the high quality camera has a 12 megapixel sensor that can capture a 4056 by 3040 pixel image note that the sensors on both the xerocam and the pi version 2 camera are roughly 4.6 millimeters diagonally whilst a high quality camera has a larger 7.9 millimeter diagonal sensor all three cameras can be used to record 1080p video at up to 30 frames per second 720p at up to 60 frames a second and 480p at up to 90 frames a second and with the right software the high quality camera can also record video at up to 120 frames a second in 480p all three cameras connect to a raspberry pi using its 15-pin camera serial interface or csi port this provides direct access to the pi system on a chip and is available in two form factors specifically most raspberry pi models have a full-size csi connector like the one we can see here on this raspberry pi 4. however the pi zero models have their own smaller csi connector note that the pi version 2 and high quality cameras come with a ribbon cable for connecting to a full-size csi connector whilst the xerocam is integrated into a ribbon cable that fits the smaller csi connector on the pi zero however alternative ribbon cables and adapters are available to allow all three cameras to be used on either type of pie and indeed in this video we'll be testing all the cameras on this raspberry pi 4. right the first camera we're going to test is the xerocam which really is a very tiny piece of hardware indeed and as we're going to be using it on a raspberry pi 4 we need to fit it in this adapter and with that taken care of we can again call on the magic of filmmaking to get everything up and running as you can see i've mounted the zero cam on a piece of flexible mesh to allow me to position it for this test as it's really not easy to temporarily mount the smaller raspberry pi cameras anyway if we now head on over to the raspberry pi os desktop here we are where as you can see i've opened up raspberry pi configuration and i've checked the camera is enabled which it is and so to test it out we can open up a terminal i've got one open all ready for us and i've got this command waiting to be executed raspi still minus o zero com1 jetpug and what this will do is to open up a camera preview window with a default time of five seconds and it'll save some output that's why we've got the o flag here and it'll call the output zero cam one a photograph which will be stored in the default location which is the pi's home directory so let's uh press the button and there we are and as you can see i've got an array of objects set up to be test subjects for this picture lots of different codes and things going on there it has been taken our image i hope anyway let's go over to our home directory down here our home folder there's the file let's open it up and there it is i'll press f11 to full screen for us and this is a pretty good image i think from such a small cheap camera let's press g here to go to a 100 zoom so you're now seeing the image at full resolution if you're watching this video at 1080p you're seeing a pixel for pixel representation now and it's pretty good isn't able to scroll around a bit which is a rather impressive image from the xero cam colours are pretty good the blacks and the whites are pretty good we've got white over here and white down there and black over there that's not too bad and the image is pretty sharp from such a low cost camera with a fixed focus lens now of course what we really want to do is to compare this image to the output of the other cameras but just before we do that let's record a piece of video let's come out of this and go back to our terminal under there and execute this command here rasp vader which is the video equivalent of the cell image capture we've got a t flag here with a 20 000 that means record for 20 000 milliseconds or in other words 20 seconds and then the o flag here is again for some output which here will be called zerocam18264 so let's record our video and the first thing you'll notice is we record video we get a crop of the sensor we're seeing 1920 to 80 here let's bring in an exciting piece of action here's the dalek yes we're seeing 1920 1080 being captured as a crop from the center with its resolution of 2592 by 1944 how long are we doing in our 20 seconds i wonder have we got time to come back no we haven't that was the video and let's just see if it worked it should have done of course no reason why not there's the file let's just bring it up and it'll play in a second there we are let's full screen it and this is our masterpiece xerocom18264 will it with an oscar oh look that's not bad is it again i'm impressed with the the output the performance of the xero cam the cheapest raspberry pi camera available and the results are still rather impressive but anyway what we really want to do is some comparisons so we'll now move on to test out the other cameras greetings here i am back again and it's now time to check out the raspberry pi camera module version 2. today this is the standard official raspberry pi camera and replaced the version 1 camera in 2016. as you can see the circuit board is actually labeled version 2.1 although i don't think a version 2.0 was ever sold if we compare the camera module version 2 to the xerocam we can see that it's a much larger module although the actual camera component is pretty much the same size do remember however that the version 2 camera has an 8 megapixel sensor compared to the 5 megapixel one in the xerocam so let's get the version two camera all connected up and running and i've used the same rig as before with the addition of a piece of string to keep the longer ribbon cable under control this is i think my first raspberry pi rig to incorporate knotted twine but i'm trying to position the cameras so they can take as similar an image as possible so let's mosey on over to the desktop to see how i've done and here we are i've set things up to take a picture so let's go and do that let's take our still i've got a pretty similar field of view but we've got a much wider lens on the version 2 camera so there we are we've taken our picture and let's go across to the fold where it is where's our picture it's down there took a second to find it there we are christopher there's the image and we're the f11 again and as with the zero cam the image looks pretty good i'll go in to do the 100 view and of course this time we have a smaller section of the image coming up because this is a larger resolution image and focus there in particular is very good that's very nice sharp part of the image isn't it the blacks and the whites is similarly pretty good it's not massively different though it's you know it's probably a better image we've certainly got more resolution here which is always a good thing to have but if we just go back to seeing the whole image it's not massively different and if i bring up versions of both images they're fairly similar there's not a massive amount of difference here the color is clearly different probably i'd say the color is better in the version two camera image than the zero cam image but this of course is before any color correction and to some extent they're just different if i show you the 100 view the pixel to pixel comparison again it's it's not massively different i think for many purposes the xerocam is a better value camera but it depends on your point of view and of course the great thing is you can look at the images here and make your own mind up although of course remember that youtube will perform lots of video compression on anything you're seeing in this video anyway talking of video let's do some video capture we must do that as well of course let's bring up the video capture thing here and this is interesting if we do this you'll see once again we've got a crop from the middle of the sensor exactly the same way we did with the azira cam and therefore you can see lester the dalek in the same position hello i'm a dalek going across giving excitement to this video you're gonna come back this time we might do yes the daleks coming back he didn't come back in the last one did he that's the benefit of having the version 2 camera but let's just to go and play that video it must be recorded where is it there it is let's play that video and the fact we're using a crop again is interesting it means you get no extra resolution in terms of recording 1080p video using the version 2 camber versus the much cheaper zero cam and to some extent you actually get a worse position because you're actually having a crop of a smaller area of the sensor because the 8 megapixel and 5 megapixel sensors in the version 2 camera and xerocam are the same physical size so of course we're using a smaller area of the sensor to record video on the version 2 camera right let's now move on to the raspberry pi high quality camera and what we effectively have here is a 12 megapixel digital back that can take either a c or a cs mount lens depending on whether or not you leave in place this c to cs mount adapter and we've also got a back focus adjustment ring here which is quite nice and a locking screw for that and at the base of the camera we've got a standard quarter inch mounting thread which means we can mount this camera using a standard quarter inch thread although the position of the ribbon cable coming down on the back of camera right behind that is far from ideal you get the impression which is a product designed by electronics designer who was told to put a thread on and he did but he didn't think at all about the implications of how it would actually work on on most mounting equipment which is a bit of a shame anyway to use this camera we need to first off take off a little cap like that and we need to add a lens and when i first bought this camera we can see the sensor in there look when i first bought the camera i thought i was going to use this little tv lens i had lying around for my cctv camera nice quality lens from many many years ago it's a c mount lens will go on perfectly well but i found the quality of the images i got just wasn't very good this lens simply can't resolve high definition images and so i actually bought the 16 millimeter recommended lens for the camera here and so we'll put this thing on like this it'll just screw in we're now getting quite a a solid device this is really a very very serious raspberry pi camera and as you can hopefully see here we've got adjustment for aperture and for focus on the camera itself these are of course manual which is good or bad depending on your point of view i like manual controls but if you want an autofocus camera or you want a fixed focus camera which can focus on a range of distances this is not an ideal lens to use and it's also worth noting of course that this is not a free lens he had to purchase this lens this lens cost me 50 pounds so i've got here now 100 pounds or 100 worth of equipment which is seven times more than the cost of the zero cam so let's go and see if the performance of this unit really matches up to its increased cost and here we are with everything set up and running a very different type of rig to our previous two tests but then the high quality camera is a much larger module than the previous two cameras we've tested even before you've added on the quite large lens and it's worth noting with the 16 millimeter lens on this camera i've had to move the camera twice as far away from our test subjects as i did in our previous tests because of the narrower field of view so let's go across to the desktop and we'll take an image and i'll put a t flag in here with a 10 second delay so we can see the image a bit longer that's been helping me with focusing but if i press the button you will see we get a very nice looking image and that's what we can see from the preview isn't it there we are let's just let that finish off i shouldn't have added the 10 seconds and there we are it's finished and if we go to the pi home page and where are we we're down here there's the hq cam image and click on that bring that up and full screen it it is a very nice image there is a certain richness to the quality of the image coming off this larger sensor on the hq camera compared to the previous cameras we've looked at and if we go to a full screen go in like that focus here depends very much on where we happen to be in the image i think i was focusing up towards the top on things like the police box there it's text on that that's nice and sharp bits of the pencils there are nice and sharp the top of that sort of cork effect on the youtube flask is sharp the text there is very good so this is quite impressive and i think the colors here are the most natural the ones we've seen this really is a very nice quality of image and before we compare this to the other cameras let's just take a piece of video let's go into the terminal again and just bring up the command for that and here you will see there's a slight crop but not a very big crop on the image there so things are shaking a little bit let's bring in the dalek though and one of the issues we have here is depth of field you see that depths of field is quite narrow here as a dalek moving around to our video image there's a slight crop but clearly we're not just using the middle of the sensor with something from a large part of the sensor to take this piece of video oh my god oh dear it finished it thought you could say exterminate if we go across to the home folder again we've got our high quality camera image there and of course it plays out as we would expect working rather nicely and a bit of image shake on the start there i've had to put an extra little table in the room to accommodate the camera being far enough away from the test subject but clearly there we're getting decent quality video and it's also worth just pointing out this is really giving us much more creative control it's very different type of instrument to work with the high quality camera compared to the other cameras let's just go back to the taking a picture let's just take another picture let's give ourselves a bit more time to work with it as we're setting it up and we'll call it cam one like that and bring up the preview and i'll go back to the dalek bring the dalek in over like that and of course here we've got the opportunity to go in and change the focus we can focus on the data and have a out of focus background a nice bit of bokeh there we couldn't do that type of effect with the previous cameras and that really is the benefit of using the raspberry pi hq camera and if we bring it up on the screen let's just look at the result of that image should be recorded somewhere down here there we are bring it up and this should be a nice image and if we go into a form that beautiful bokeh there behind the the dalek this is as i said that's a fantastic result from a raspberry pi camera oh and before i forget let's have some three-way comparisons of the xero cam the version 2 cam and the high quality camera and here we're looking at some scaled sections where clearly the high quality camera gives us the best quality image certainly the color reproduction is the best for the high quality camera although for me the second best quality here is from a zero cam with the worst being the version 2 camera and if we now look at some 100 sections zoomed right in again the high quality camera wins it really should given the price of the camera and again for me the second choice would be the xerocam which really is i think the best value camera here on test as we've seen in this video all of the different raspberry pi cameras can capture decent photographs and videos and for many projects for cheaper models deliver perfectly satisfactory results in my next raspberry pi video i'm going to delve deeper into pi photography with an episode all about how to capture the best time-lapse movies using our favorite sbc but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 55,996

Rating: 4.9737477 out of 5

Keywords: Rapberry Pi, camera, Raspberry Pi camera, Raspberry Pi camera test, Raspberry Pi photography, how to use a Raspberry Pi camera, Raspberry Pi camera setup, ZeroCam, Raspberry Pi Sky Camera, Raspberry Pi Camera V2, Pi Camera V2.1, Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera, Raspberry Pi HQ camera, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Raspberry Pi camera specifications

Id: -NxpCirSqm4

Length: 18min 51sec (1131 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 08 2021