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...
Other brands do use IMX* sensors, but not the ones listed in this comment, they are larger than the ones typically found in phones such as the IMX712 IMX787 IMX890 etc...
Note than a lot of the phone sensors aren't actually that impressive, but instead rely on an insane amount of computational photography algorithms to improve the image.
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.
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.
I really meant using the Pi's camera connector. I'll take "only" HD resolution over something higher any day if the payoff is better image quality.
https://www.arducam.com/imx519-autofocus-camera-module-for-r...
