[ACCount37]

They aren't intended to be available frankly. You either buy them as camera modules, smartphone type or IP camera type, or don't at all.

A part of it is just how involved the manufacturing of those camera modules is. The sensor chips ships as bare silicon dies. They're precisely placed, glued and wire bonded to the substrate PCB, then adorned with a focus/OIS voice coil frame and a lens assembly. Absolutely nothing about this process is hobbyist friendly.

The other part is that corporations are incredibly stupid about how "valuable" their precious proprietary data is, and would rather jump into a volcano than give a sensor datasheet to someone who doesn't look like they have at least 20 lawyers employed and can take a MOQ of 100000 units. And how would one use a sensor without a datasheet, or a bring-up register sequence, or anything at all?

Vendor buying agreements and NDAs often prevent hobbyist-grade sensor boards from even existing. Especially for cutting edge high performance sensors, like the ones found in flagship smartphones.

[amelius]

Ok, how would you buy them if you were a small company making e.g. scientific instruments?

[ACCount37]

You wouldn't!

You'd buy instead an "industrial/automation/automotive" sensor - one that has a fraction of the raw resolution, but maybe spots some other perks. Like a global shutter with no rolling shutter distortions, a "no RGGB Bayer" option that lets you set up your own filters and pick what wavelengths you care about, a package that's amenable to low volume manufacturing, longevity guarantees, availability in quantities of tens instead of tens of thousands, or actual documentation that you can get without 3-6 months of salesman and lawyer negotiations.

Or you'd buy a ready-made "scientific instrument" camera from someone else. Which probably has another "industrial" sensor - maybe worse, maybe better than one you could get directly, depending on how up to date the catalog is and how good of a working relationship does the instrument company have with the sensor vendors. And a price tag in 4-5 digits range. Then you would integrate that thing as a subsystem into whatever science hardware you wanted to make.

But if you truly want the "flagship smartphone" mix of small sensor size, low cost and high resolution? There are no good options! Clearly, the tech just hasn't advanced far enough for that!

[amelius]

Then how do you explain that Digikey still sells many camera sensors.

For example this one:

https://mm.digikey.com/Volume0/opasdata/d220001/medias/docus...

[ACCount37]

Have you even looked at this datasheet? This is one of those "industrial" sensors I was talking about.

It's not CMOS. It doesn't even have a digital interface. It has basically nothing in common with the kind of image sensors you'd find in a flagship smartphone, like Samsung ISOCELL. It's a very specialized device made for a very short list of uses, none of which are in consumer electronics.

Most sensors you'll see there are similar. Not all of them are as hideously exotic as the one you linked, but very few of them are the SKUs you'd find in a smartphone. The closest thing to a smartphone camera sensor would probably be STMicroelectronics VD56G3, which is similar to VD56G0 that Apple uses in iPhone FaceID. And even that is a specialized structured light NIR piece.

[amelius]

Ok, I'm still curious who the audience is of websites like:

https://semiconductor.samsung.com/image-sensor/

[ACCount37]

Probably just the tech press and the rare industry clients who aren't already in touch through other channels. They sure aren't selling to hobbyists.

The contact data is real, but you'd have to at least look like a decent sized company to get anywhere with it.