Raspberry Pi's improved camera module supports interchangeable lenses
It has a 12-megapixel Sony back-illuminated sensor.
Raspberry Pi has launched a new high-quality, interchangeable lens camera for budding photographers or folks who want to learn how tointegrate a camera into their build projects. It comes with a 7.9mm (Type 1/2.3) Sony IMX477 12.3-megapixel back-illuminated sensor, along with a mount that works with off the shelf C- and CS-mount lenses used on industrial and 16mm film cameras.
Dubbed the “High Quality Camera,” it’s a big step up from the Camera Module V2 from 2016. While it’s much less compact, the back-side illumination and much larger pixels will make it much more capable in low-light. It comes with a back-focus adjustment ring and tripod mount, and the larger format sensor is close to what you’d see on a compact camera, rather than a smartphone.
It doesn’t come with a lens, but Raspberry Pi resellers will be offering a 6mm CS-mount CCTV lens for $15, and a higher-quality 16mm C-mount model for $50. You can also get some pretty incredible new and used C-mount lenses at place like B&H Photo Video and eBay. If you want to go even farther, it’s easy to adapt a 16mm mount to a modern APS-C or even full-frame lens, as Raspberry Pi showed (hilariously) below. The Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera is now on sale for $50, with a dust cap, C-CS adapter, tripod mount and ribbon cable to connect to a Raspberry Pi.
