[joshvm]

Bin the image from a raspberry pi camera by a factor of.. 8 or so (maybe 16 if you need smaller)? Load the image as grayscale and divide the counts by 64 to get 2-bit values.

Kinda difficult to buy crappy low resolution detectors these days because nobody makes them and you'd need to build the readout electronics yourself. You might as well just use a decent detector and make it look bad.

[anfractuosity]

You can also interestingly get the raw sensor data from the Pi camera too, as in before the demosaicing is applied.

I wonder, this may be silly, but could you not potentially get a slightly higher resolution image, if you just created a pixel for every sensel. Than if you were to apply the demosaicing algorithm then convert to grayscale.

[kqr]

> I wonder, this may be silly, but could you not potentially get a slightly higher resolution image, if you just created a pixel for every sensel. Than if you were to apply the demosaicing algorithm then convert to grayscale.

That's along the lines of what the Leica Monochrom promises. One drawback of doing it with a regular Bayer sensor is that the colour filters eat light, so while the number of pixels will increase significantly, the spatial resolution may not be that much better.

[joshvm]

You'd get the same resolution because colour cameras interpolate (demosaicing). If you converted to grayscale you might get problems because each pixel has a different colour response with the bayer filter. You'd still need to do some intensity correction.

The performance of the Leica Monochrom is due to this - you don't get more pixels per sensor, but you get proper intensity values at each pixel. This corresponds to better effective spatial resolution in most cases. All they're doing is selling you an identical sensor and pretending it's something fancy and new...

When you buy industrial cameras, the colour and mono versions are identical, but one is filtered (they use the same detector). We use mono in industry often because image quality tends to be much better than colour, and you have a third of the bandwidth requirements (or you want to filter a specific waveband).

[anfractuosity]

Cheers, that Leica looks very cool.

I just had a little play with the raw data from the Pi camera yesterday using the excellent PiCamera lib.

[colejohnson66]

Don’t older cameras have a higher SNR? How would you simulate that? Lower the bit depth?