Hi Guys
I'm a radio tech that works on land mobile radio, and also have my HAM license. I've got a bit of experience flying a quad rotor (about 9 hours on it of flight time now) and have played around with fixed wing a bit 5 flights with a friends Typhoon 2, and of course a lot of time on an RC simulator. I've got a Skywalker 1.68 in the mail, and am setting up a UAV with a camera on a pan-tilt turret on the bottom, kind like the Desert Hawk.
Anyway, I was wondering about zoom-able cameras. The best route seems to be either a foxtech box camera, or a sony box camera.
http://www .foxtechfpv.com/fh10z-pal10x-optical-zoom-rc-controlled-camworld-smallest-7-p-166.html
However, I was thinking. Seeing as we're only transmitting like 640x480 max anyway, would it be possible to have an HD camera, and use only an "digital zoom"? You could zoom in many times without reducing the picture quality lower then 640x480. This would be no moving parts, which is always a plus.
Streaming video out from a view screen of a digital camera might be one way. Any other thoughts on how to do this? Somebody must have thought of this and be doing it already?
I'd love to hear your comments,
Barry
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Replies
But like Luke said, the zoom amount is not big.
And don't listen to those who says "it's impossible" ;-)
What you want is impossible. Digital Zoom is a consumer gimmick and seriously compromises the image quality. If you start with 640x480 and do a digital zoom in by 50%, then you are taking the pixels in the center 320x240 in the original image and spread them out to the 640x480 output. The software in the camera then guesses what the in-between pixels should contain.
Maybe in a few years when Light Field cameras mature a bit more....
There really isn't that much resolution to work with, at most you'd get 2.25x zoom (1080/480 = 2.25) which isn't much zoom.