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upstart writes in with an IRC submission for Fnord666:

Raspberry Pi launches camera with interchangeable lens system for $50:

Attention tinkerers: Raspberry Pi has released a new camera for its tiny single-board computers. The "Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera" is on sale now for $50, and it will be sold alongside the older Raspberry Pi Camera Module V2, which will still be the usual $25. This is a for-real camera system, so that $50 won't get you a ready-out-of-the-box Raspberry Pi camera, you'll also need to buy a lens for the—get this—interchangeable lens system that the high-quality camera supports.

Both cameras plug into the Raspberry Pi computer's camera serial interface using a ribbon cable, but the High Quality Camera looks like a massive upgrade, both in size and (hopefully) in image quality. While the $25 Camera Module V2 uses an ancient, low-end smartphone camera sensor with a microscopic lens, the High Quality Camera is a different class of product entirely. It's not a newer smartphone sensor, which is what I assumed when I first saw the news, but instead it's something that was originally intended for camcorders. It's a 12.3MP Sony IMX477 sensor with pretty huge 1.55 µm pixels and a 7.81 mm diagonal (1/2.3"-type). That's about double the sensor area of the Camera Module V2.

[...] The specs are in the same ballpark as a modern smartphone camera sensor, but the lenses for the High Quality Camera will blow your phone camera out of the water. There is an interchangeable lens system with support for off-the-shelf C- and CS-mount lenses and a back focus adjustment ring for swapping between lenses. This mount isn't as big as a DSLR lens—it's a smaller size that frequently gets used for 16mm CCTV video cameras. In addition to the native C-mount lenses out there, there are also plenty of adapters, and you can easily jump up to a real DSLR size like an EF Canon mount.

Would make for a nice camera rig on a telescope

Original Submission