It's unfair to compare an idling deep sleep device with a cold boot.

However, there is a shortcut: Just don't boot a full OS (thinking of custom firmware which boots in fractions of seconds, standard in the Microcontroller world). Or boot an optimized Linux user space. I am confident with a bit fiddling one can bring down a standard SBC Linux to a few seconds from cold to ready.

There have been attempts to make the Pi boot faster (by disabling the initialization of various subsystems), e.g.:

https://github.com/IronOxidizer/instant-pi

https://himeshp.blogspot.com/2018/08/fast-boot-with-raspberr...

https://kittenlabs.de/blog/2024/09/01/extreme-pi-boot-optimi... (previously featured here too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41420597)

https://mitxela.com/projects/thermal_paper_polaroid talks about making a camera with a raspberry pi, and by using Buildroot they got it down to acceptable boot times

i built my own camera out of a Zero 2W [0] and by disabling Picam2 and letting the OS (Debian Bullseye) idle, i can get 2 days of shots and some videos while i walk around the city/hiking out of 3 18650 batteries... bringing 3 spare batteries in my backpack never put me needing battery in any situation! starting Picam2 takes a fraction of a second

[0] https://happort.org/camera

Things lost to time: The Minolta Dimage A1 had contacts for detecting when gripped, so it could ready itself without any button pressed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minolta_Dimage_A1 (You see it in the pic, but its not described in the article).

The early Sony Alpha A7 cameras run Android (really: you could jailbreak and write your own PlayMemories apps)

https://github.com/ma1co/sony-pmca-re

https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/59226/does-the-son...

So there must have been a way to do this at that time. (I suspect a simpler subsystem does initial boot response).

I did contemplate building something around one of the Arducam modules and an RP2350.

Comparing that to a real camera: I can "quick draw" pick up a Nikon DSLR that's off, flick the power switch and hit the shutter button one handed in one motion as fast as I can move and there's a good picture on the screen as soon as I let go of the trigger. Double click trash can and it's gone. Either will take less than half a second. Battery life is so long I usually forget to charge it. I suspect the power switch is just a "key lock" that prevents triggering anything because there's no delay. Either that or it's a wakeup in the microcontroller range of timing.

(You can easily get jank by filling up the buffer or slow memory card or autofocusing on something impossible, possibly in the dark etc, of course.)

Sub 2-second booting Linux is generally possible, either by bundling everything into a big image or by creating a fixed hibernation file and resuming from it. That's what they do for real embedded systems, but the downside is that they tend to be monolithic and not so update or modding friendly.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTcP3xeLrEY

My kid has a Fisher-Price Kid Tough camera. It's excellent for us but the pictures are so bad even the kid is disappointed.

It would be fun to repace the guts with something like this project but a long boot time is a deal breaker.

Perhaps the software can be optimised or a DIY friendly pi pico project is the way.

Nice, my Google 10 I feel boots rather fast but I'd say 5sec to boot, unlock, camera +5 secs so it would be 10 for me - 3 seconds I envy you.

It’s possible to boot Linux in seconds, it’d just be a terrible developer experience.

I bet this could be changed to seconds if a unikernel type approach were used. There’s no need to boot a full OS. I understand the developer starting with Linux, though, as I’m sure it’s easier for debugging.

you can get a zero booting under 10 seconds fairly reliably.

still slower than a hot phone with an app, but it's faster than 22s.

I agree with the premise but that's a bad comparison. If you have your iphone off, do you get to the camera in 3 seconds as well, after booting?

Not from off state, though? Granted I still expect the iphone to boot quicker than 20 seconds.

Cameras shouldn't need to boot at all.

There's Will Whang's boards - IMX585 [1] (16:9 1"-ish) and even IMX283 [2] (1") and even IMX294 [3] (Micro 4/3). But just those camera boards run $199 to $399, and released in "artisanal quantities" (I think their hand-assembled!)... so you have to pounce when restocked. Soho Enterprise has some IMX585 boards as well and I've seen some IMX585 MIPI CSI boards on aliexpress afair but never tried them

I'm experimenting with and have built a rangefinder-style camera [4], built around the IMX585 or IMX283 (the only boards I got my hands on) but using a CM5, this thing gets hot. It works though! Not too much bigger than my Leica Q. Haven't released anything yet but I tend to work on it and the model is in OnShape. Currently planning a complete screen-less redesign in FreeCAD... so that's _really_ different and slow, but I'm so over proprietary software :/

There's also the CinePi project using those sensors on a full-size Pi with a pretty active discord server.

[1] https://github.com/will127534/StarlightEye

[2] https://github.com/will127534/OneInchEye

[3] https://github.com/will127534/FourThirdsEye

[4] https://cad.onshape.com/documents/29c9488b2d4b80b73bcf3980/w...

> No disrespect to the project here, of course, but I'm wondering why there's no truly high-quality camera for Pis.

Not Pi specific on the camera interface ribbon cable, no, but most any raspberry pi 3b or 4 will work with almost any 'high end, high quality' USB webcam type camera for still image capture using all the same software tools that exist for any debian-based CLI environment.

By “high quality” you mean big sensor? 1” is possible - https://github.com/will127534/imx294-v4l2-driver and see OneInchEye based on the IMX283.

While many camera sensors use MIPI/CSI, you need enough lanes to transfer the data, the driver support in the kernel and other pipeline bits to get good images from the bayer. Almost all “real” cameras use ASICs or FPGAs to clock out the images. Additionally sensor companies are miserable to deal with in small volume and datasheets are under NDA. You’re much better off buying a camera from a machine vision company over USB3 or Ethernet, but you need one which properly enumerates as a video device (many do not). You can still do nice stuff like hardware sync/trigger from the Pi.

Interfacing is too complicated and manufacturers are too secretive with secret sauces to make sensors not just behave but to look not potato.

There's the Arducam IMX519 with 16 megapixels, Sony IMX 519 sensor

https://www.arducam.com/imx519-autofocus-camera-module-for-r...

I have a box full of film gear and development equipment because, one day, I want to hang a picture of my kids on the wall that I _made_. My photo, on film I developed, printed manually by my hand, hung in a frame I built. I'll get to it some day!

The idea of building a camera like this tickles me the same way. It's fun!

It would be great for kids who you don’t want to give a phone to. I got something similar for my young kids and they love it.

But also there doesn’t always need to be a “why” beyond it being fun for the creator to create.

Oh my god if you’re asking that question you’re on the wrong site

Photos aren't only about quality, especially there days where it's popular to use lower resolution cameras, with worse optics. Specifically for portraits, it's common to use diffusion filters that reduce a bit details/contrast or do that in editing so you don't see every little "defect" on someone's skin.

Some people specifically want something other than their phones because they don't want to always have their phone or use it all the time, others want better controls or a different experience.

I was looking around but either I missed it or it’s not spelled out. Do you recall a ballpark cost for the components? I didn't feel like individually pricing out the many components.

It's using a IMX708, which is used as a secondary sensor on some modern smartphones.