I’m looking for a good high quality camera I can mount to a gimbal.
Flying a quadcopter, about 1kg with 980kv SunnySky motors (10in props). Have room for about 200g more or so.
Has a Pixhawk and RasberyPI. I want to use it for some amateur photography/video, but would also like to use it as a FPV while flying.
Any recommendations?
Those are 2 different cameras.
So there are not decent quality cameras that I can use for FPV? Is that because if you’re streaming, it can’t record? Sorry I don’t understand why one camera couldn’t do both. Even my original cheap Walmart drone could do both. I’m not looking for professional photos/videos.
Digital systems like Walksnail or DJI will take reasonable video during flight. If you want a dedicated photography/video system you can look to brands like Siyi. They make some gimbal mounted cameras.
Traditionally a camera used for video/photography will have higher latency than is wanted for FPV. Whereas an FPV camera has the lower latency, it also has the lower video quality. Depending on your goals you can prioritize one over the other and maybe find a system that will do both for you accepting the trade-offs.
Yes, I’ve experienced that with my own setup over the years.
If you want good photographs you’ll need a good Hi-res camera which saves images on its own SD card. No use trying to stream it and than suffer quality losses in the process.
Photos taken (snapshot) from video are nowhere near as good in quality.
Here is an example. Looks OK at first glance but once you zoom in the pixels become obvious.
Thanks Karl! Which FPV camera are you in that image?
It was taken with Kodak SP360 and recorded to SD card.
The actual FPV camera (not shown in photo) is a SIYI’s R1M camera which was part of the MK15 Enterprise Kit.
Note on the side: This a network camera. So if you are just starting with video streaming you might want to use another system with its own video transmitter.
I have also played around with USB cameras and RPi’s camera and used a 3G/4G wireless broadband dongle to sent signal to ground-station.
But as many on here will tell you the quality of both those camera types are not as good as some other variations out there. Only benefit with the RPi camera is that you get full access to video signal and could use things like object detection, light filtering and some other functions not found in other systems.
Below is a side by side comparison of some mentioned cameras:
