The new 8 Megapixel Raspberry Pi camera is released today. It’s fully backward compatible with all camera-enabled Raspberry Pis produced to-date. It uses a SONY IMX219 sensor capable of 3280 x 2464 pixel stills. It’s mechanically almost identical to the previous camera model (V1.3) except for rounded corners on the PCB – and there’s no red LED on the front. There’s also a NOIR version being released at the same time. They both support 1080p30, 720p60 and 640x480p90 video.
Here’s a video overview…
Raspberry Pi camera 2.1 and NOIR 2.1
Specifications
Lens: Fixed focus
Megapixels: 8 megapixel native resolution sensor
Camera Resolution: 3280 x 2464 pixel stills
Video Resolution: 1080p30, 720p60 and 640x480p90 video
Dimensions: 25mm x 23mm x 9mm
Weight: ~3g
Connector: ribbon connector
Interface: CSI
Where Can I Get One?
The Pi Hut, RS, Farnell and all good Pi retailers.
It is NOIR camera or not?
I think it’s clearly explained in the blog and video.
How long it takes to reach in Canada?
http://canada.newark.com/raspberry-pi/rpi-8mp-camera-board/raspberry-pi-camera-board-v2/dp/77Y6521
http://canada.newark.com/raspberry-pi/rpi-noir-camera-board/raspberry-pi-noir-camera-board/dp/77Y6522
I ordered from pihut. It is much cheaper than in Canada.
Thanks!
There is another mechanical difference apart form the round corners, it appears that the square assembly around the lens is slightly bigger for the v2 compared to the v1. I noticed this because the pimoroni camera mount does not fit as snugly for the v2 compared to the v1. The pimoroni camera mount has a square hole in it for the square bit around the camera lens to go through. For the v1 camera, the square assembly around the lens fits perfectly into the square hole. But for the v2 camera, the square assembly does not fit through the same hole.
The V2.1 camera is good but I cannot find complete & definitive raspistill documents and the correct update sequence to the PI B, Pi 2, or Pi 3 to utilize this new camera. Opinions seem to vary about the sudo apt-get sequence or sudo apt-upgrade. I understand the so called ‘firmware’ upgrade is not really firmware but part of the boot load or a replacement library, can anyone help with this. Also Programs like MotionEye probably do not take advantage of the V2.1 camera. Any comments appreciated.
I am using the V2.1 for MotionEye and another V2.1 for Astrophotography, in the MotionEye application night time sensitivity is low and auto exposure does not work but in the Astrophotography application where I use Raspistill and a 500 mm lens the increased sensitivity and additional megapixels make a very noticeable improvement. I only recently found out the exposure can be increased from 6 seconds maximum to 10 seconds so I am wondering why this information is not in a Raspberry Pi document somewhere easy to find. Thanks
Well, there’s https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/camera/README.md and https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/raspbian/applications/camera.md
(and see also the not-yet-merged https://github.com/raspberrypi/documentation/pull/378 and https://github.com/raspberrypi/documentation/pull/379 )
When the camera was first released (April 2016), it probably needed a ‘sudo rpi-update’ to get firmware new enough to recognise it. But now that the latest recent Raspbian release is from May 2016, I suspect the new camera is probably supported ‘out of the box’? (the Raspberry Pi is different to a lot of devices, in that the firmware is all stored on the SD card rather than being e.g. flashed into ROM / EEPROM)
I have no comments regarding MotionEye as I’ve never used it.
If you have specific questions, the best place to ask them is probably https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewforum.php?f=43